| Post/Author/DateTime | Post |
|---|---|
| polt05-02-05, 11:12 AM | So it's up. What do you guys think? It's good with some flavour, although I had figured most of it out myself. Cool with some new feats, and i can't wait for next part :) |
| EvilDrPuma05-02-05, 11:33 AM | I like it. The Lhaazar Principalities include a lot of non-coastal areas, by the scale of the map, and the description in the ECS didn't really account for it. The Dragonshard only does so to a limited degree, but the mention of landlubbing officials and their relationship to the princes says enough to give me a starting point. The feats seem reasonable, granting meaningful but not overpowered benefits and serving the flavor of the region well. (I imagine there are a lot of magewright ship's carpenters out there with the Ship's Mage feat.) |
| treehouse91605-02-05, 12:19 PM | I liked it quite a bit. I'm looking forward to part 2. The Expert Swimmer feat makes a lot of sense, and for some reason I really dig Ship Mage as well. By the way, could you tell me something about Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulators? |
| Korhal_IV05-02-05, 02:02 PM | C'mon Part 2! :) |
| gaerfindel05-02-05, 02:19 PM | Pirates of Darkwater, here I come!!! What intrigue me most are the polyglot culture of the Principalities, and the connect to Sarlonna. I really can't wait for the next one! |
| Isran_Imrador05-02-05, 02:22 PM | I like this one (to :) ) Nice to know that bit of imigrant history Gnomes here and elfs there :) And we are currenty in Regalport in one off our grups...My gnome Artificer will noe maybe have some relatives in the south LP.. And Part 2 has got to be very usefull (and cool) Thanks Keith :) (now all i need is Part 1-5 on Lyrandar and 2 parts on Q`barra.. ;) ) |
| EvilDrPuma05-02-05, 02:49 PM | By the way, could you tell me something about Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulators? There is supposed to be an earth-shattering "kaboom." |
| ENHenry05-02-05, 02:52 PM | I enjoyed it, and it gave me a more more vivid impression of the Principalities than I initially received. Does anyone know off the top of their heads if Lhazaar was mentioned as being a woman in the ECS? That totally slipped by me. I keep getting the urge to stage an LP adventure next time I run Eberron, and pull out my Green Ronin Freeport stuff to supplement it, because Freeport looks tailor-made for Regalport... :) |
| ieattrollsforbreakfast05-02-05, 02:53 PM | I'll admit that it wasn't something I was especially hoping for, but I enjoyed this one. It just adds another reason to start a pirate campaign :) I don't know why, but I always thought Lhazaar was a bloke. Just sounds like a male name to me ;) Then again, many Eberron races don't seem to make much distinction between male and female names, so its not exactly unusual. I can't wait for part 2 :D |
| Pozas05-02-05, 03:29 PM | Lhazaar was never called as being male or female in the ECS (although I too had the male image for Lhazaar). Nice turn of events to have the daring explorer that led a fleet to settle on Khorvaire to be a woman! |
| Pallis05-02-05, 03:43 PM | It makes me wonder at what point Dragonshards crosses over to the published material released by Wizards... What I mean is, what with the recent mis-information, information not included, etc. in RoE, will information contained in the Five Nations also include the information and flavour so generously offered by Keith in his web-based articles...? Got to say, however - another excellent article... |
| DarkWarriorKarg05-02-05, 04:46 PM | It makes me wonder at what point Dragonshards crosses over to the published material released by Wizards... What I mean is, what with the recent mis-information, information not included, etc. in RoE, will information contained in the Five Nations also include the information and flavour so generously offered by Keith in his web-based articles...? Got to say, however - another excellent article... That... is a valid concern, actually. Maybe they'll start a brown-covered "Countries of..." series so that DMs can include the countries in their own worlds... :eek: :weep: :raincloud :yuck: :banghead: |
| Hellcow05-02-05, 04:53 PM | One quick note that I meant to put in the article but somehow missed: The three feats presented in this Dragonshard are actually taken from Stormwrack, an upcoming book in the Environment series (Frostburn, Sandstorm, etc). Obviously this book will be very useful for any sort of Lhazaar campaign, and the feats give you a sense of what to expect. But they aren't actually my work. I was given a small selection of feats from the book to choose from, and decided that with room for three, these seemed like the best choices - but there's certainly more interesting stuff to come! |
| DM Ront05-02-05, 04:54 PM | I actually started a story arc in Lhazaar last friday, so this dragonshardis pretty cool for me, I liked the descriptions, although I'm kind of anxious about part 2 as I already wrote up polital orientations for several principalities... oh well. Lhazaar is definately a really good place to set an adventure, particularly if one of your party members happens to be a member of house Lyrandar. :) |
| Just another user05-02-05, 05:02 PM | One quick note that I meant to put in the article but somehow missed: The three feats presented in this Dragonshard are actually taken from Stormwrack, an upcoming book in the Environment series (Frostburn, Sandstorm, etc). Obviously this book will be very useful for any sort of Lhazaar campaign, and the feats give you a sense of what to expect. But they aren't actually my work. I was given a small selection of feats from the book to choose from, and decided that with room for three, these seemed like the best choices - but there's certainly more interesting stuff to come! You gotta be kidding me? An Enviroment book that could actually be useful and is not just a series of <foo> feats, <foo> spells and <foo> monsters (where <foo> is an element/enviromental condition)? I can't believe it. :eek: |
| Solarious05-02-05, 05:14 PM | Nope, Lhazaar is female. And I found the reference too! :smirk: Please turn to page 187, and locate the the section entitled 'Adventure Ideas'. Very last hook, at the bottom right corner... it says: "... the mythic explorer Lhazaar herself." So. Female. :devil: |
| AvonRekaes05-02-05, 05:23 PM | This is very awesome for me. I just started a game in the Lhazzar Principalities last month. We've already been to Piritar though, and I made it a rough-and-tumble pirate shanty town. Perhaps I'll retcon it and say it was a pirate den close to Piritar. Seeing as how one of my PCs is a human monk from Adar, who is searching for an artifact that the Inspired are interested in, keeping Piritar as Sarlona-influenced will be pretty important to my campaign. All-in-all I found this very helpful. Right now the campaign date is the 20th of Nymm, so I won't have to worry about the harsh winters just yet, but when I do I plan to use the information on surviving cold environments in Frostburn (Which I actually liked, contary to popular opinion). |
| Restless05-02-05, 05:46 PM | Man, finally! LP has long stuck out as one of the most interesting places in Eberron, IMO, so I'm pretty happy about this. Off topic, but I really like the Enviornment series. I don't even know why...they're just cool. |
| Roxlimn05-03-05, 11:22 PM | The whole "pirates banding together to fight a common enemy" thing seems a little heavy handed and unrealistic to me. Sure, that would mean that they could resist invasion more easily, but then again, who wants to invade a no-resource land on the edge of nowhere with no strategic value whatsoever? Moreover, the whole "band together" thing seems problematic from a boundary sort of thing. What exactly constitutes "attacking a pirate?" For example, if Prince Mika Cloudreaver decides to attack a Lyrandar shipping vessel for some insane reason, she would have the ire of Lyrandar on her head. Most probably, Lyrandar would send a vessel or two to extract the necessary respect - you don't attack the most powerful power on the sea and not expect some kind of retribution. What then? The Pirates could band together and fight, but with the power of the Dragonmarks behind them and a continent-ful of shipping Magewrights to power their navy, Lyrandar can simply blockade Lhazaar into starvation if they wanted to be cute about it. Moreover, they'll have Airships and the support of their allies Orien and Cannith, if they seriously wanted to fight. Lhazaar wouldn't stand a chance. Obviously the cleaner alternative would be for Prince Rygar to talk with Lyrandar reps and let Cloudreaver and Lyrandar settle the matter for themselves - probably with Cloudreaver on the bad end of a losing battle. Allowing Lyrandar to protect Lyrandar specific ships with their clout frees the rest of the pirates to prey on nation-based and privateer shipping, which is a win-win situation for both sea powers. It's a sensible agreement to come to. We have thus an exception to the general band-together rule - attack Lyrandar shipping at your own risk. What other possible exceptions can there be? Is this exception even acceptable? Should Lyrandar be fair game to just any pirate? What do you think? |
| MavrickWeirdo05-04-05, 12:02 AM | Moreover, they'll have Airships and the support of their allies Orien and Cannith, if they seriously wanted to fight. I'm not sure Orien would be an ally exactly. Lyrandar can simply blockade Lhazaar into starvation if they wanted to be cute about it. Lhazaar is a series of islands over 4000 miles long. Let's say "Prince Mika's Cloudreavers" attacks a Lyrandar ship, and somehow Lhazaar gets evidence of this. A Lyrandar flotilla arrives at Regalport demanding Prince Mika. High Prince Ryger, tells them she isn't there, but has heard she may have stopped at Port Verge. When they get to Port Verge, "no Prince Mika is't here, but her ship was seen by another captain, heading toward Port Krez." the shell game continues So then Lyrandar decides they need spies on the islands to tell them where Prince Mika is "hiding". So they hire House Phiarlan. Which does not work well because House Thuranni has a standing deal with High Prince Ryger. As recent history tells us, seizing foriegn territory is easy, controling foriegn territory is almost impossible. |
| scaryfroman05-04-05, 12:30 AM | Once again a great quality article here. I was also glad that it was released on Sunday rather than Monday. Worked well for my scedule. |
| Roxlimn05-04-05, 02:55 AM | Great! Some discussion. Lhazaar is a series of islands over 4000 miles long. Let's say "Prince Mika's Cloudreavers" attacks a Lyrandar ship, and somehow Lhazaar gets evidence of this. A Lyrandar flotilla arrives at Regalport demanding Prince Mika. Well, no. If Lhazaar wanted to war with Lyrandar, Lyrandar wouldn't send a flotilla to Regalport, they'd simply overhaul every ship they see in the vicinity and sink it if it didn't contain a member of one of their guilds. They do control the Windwrights Guild, after all. High Prince Ryger, tells them she isn't there, but has heard she may have stopped at Port Verge. When they get to Port Verge, "no Prince Mika is't here, but her ship was seen by another captain, heading toward Port Krez." the shell game continues I like to think that Lyrandar has better means of ferreting out information than depending on other heads of state or, God forbid, having to depend on pirates. So then Lyrandar decides they need spies on the islands to tell them where Prince Mika is "hiding". So they hire House Phiarlan. Which does not work well because House Thuranni has a standing deal with High Prince Ryger. I don't think any House would support any pirate in a direct assult against House interests, except as part of a complicated intrigue. It sets a dangerous precedent. The Houses tend to support one another against outside forces. If House Thuranni had a deal with High Prince Ryger, then the best House to approach for information on the Isles is House Thuranni, and none other. Woe to the House that undermines another directly. Lyrandar may not be an information broker, but it has ways of dealing with an enemy and the last thing the Houses want to see is another War of the Mark. Even the rather brash toe-stepping by Tharashk on Deneith interests is getting serious attention, even though most of the Houses don't particularly like Deneith. If I were Lyrandar and I was looking to have punitive action against the Cloudreavers, I'd set a free bounty on the information as well as hire the best house for the job as an information source. Of course, meeting up with Ryger is necessary as a matter of courtesy, but relying on him for information would not be the best of courses. Since Lyrandar controls the Windwrights Guild, it has a man on board practically every vessel afloat from the Five Nations. Searching for Mika would be a snap. Once her location is known, send the ships. Based on the resources Mika has in the ECS, she'd fold like a deck of cards against a Lyrandar flotilla. I think the key here is that you think Lyrandar plays fair, blithely believes other people, or in general behaves like fools. They don't. They're the preeminent sea power on the continent ever since since Galifar declared martime shipping their monopoly. The splitting of the Five Nations can only increase their influence as they play one nation against another. The decline of Galifar as a central powerful navy force can only be good for them - as it was good for Lhazaar. Think of a pirate, some lone rogue Lyrandar-scion privateer in the Lhazaar Isles. Are we sure he's really a rogue? When Lyrandar finally moves against Mika, they won't be interested in controlling any land territory. All they're interested in is securing their prestige. And they can do that by scuttling every single one of Mika's Cloudreavers, townships be damned. Even if Mika wasn't in any one of her ships, it sends a powerful message - don't mess with Lyrandar - and that's all they really want to say. Mika can go raise a new fleet from scratch if she wants to, and hopefully, she gets the message before Lyrandar really sets out to kill her. Lyrandar's territory is the sea, and their Dragonmarks make them supreme on it, wherever they may go. Being able to sail against the wind makes even one Lyrandar war vessel more than a match for what we know of Mika's fleet. |
| MarkB05-04-05, 04:40 AM | Lyrandar's territory is the sea, and their Dragonmarks make them supreme on it, wherever they may go. Being able to sail against the wind makes even one Lyrandar war vessel more than a match for what we know of Mika's fleet. Much as I love House Lyrandar, I think you're overestimating them at the Principalities' expense. Lyrandar is a merchant shipping House - they don't have a dedicated fleet of warships. Their superior propulsion technology and weather control does give them an edge, but quite possibly not a large enough one. The ships of the Principalities are built for war, and they have centuries of experience in doing so. They may not have bound elementals or dragonmarks, but they will have powerful weather-mages of their own, able to rival Lyrandar's dragonmark powers. And they have an intimate knowledge of their territory - every cove, every hidden channel, every bottleneck where an enemy can be defeated by local superiority of numbers. House Lyrandar's seagoing fleet probably matches any two principalities' fleets in number, but that fleet has duties. Every day they spend doing things other than transporting goods loses Lyrandar profits, and with competition from House Orien, various independent Zilargan shipping companies, and merchant fleets from the Principalities themselves, Lyrandar can't afford to tie up their ships in non-paying work for very long. Any siege which successfully bottled up even a portion of the Principalities would starve out Lyrandar before it starved out the pirates. |
| Roxlimn05-04-05, 05:29 AM | MarkB: I, on the other hand, believe that you don't really understand what a Dragonmarked Merchant House really is. 1. Lyrandar demonstrably is involved in wartime pursuits. Airships were designed primarily as war machines and they were designed primarily to function piloted by Lyrandar helmsmen and captains - ergo Lyrandar is involved in wartime pursuits, just not mercenary pursuits. 2. Lyrandar is a merchant house, not a corporation. No surviving nation's navy is powerful enough or interested enough to protect Lyrandar's interests in the open sea. Indeed, with the variety of hostile elements out there in the Eberrionian coasts, pirates are just another thing to be worrying about. Real mariners never had to deal with a Kraken. Lyrandar mariners occasionally do. Moreover, their interests occasionally can take a decidedly marital bent from time to time, as is almost always the case with a maritime power. A merchant house isn't just a really powerful corporation - it's a political entity very much like a nation, and like a nation, it needs to defend itself. The Montagues from Romeo and Juliet had a demonstrably military arm and they were just a small time merchant house in a small city state. A House on the level of Lyrandar would probably have fleets of Merchant Marines to protect its interests. 3. Lyrandar controls the Windwrights Guild throughout the continent of Khorvaire. That means that every single ship Magewright living in the Five Nations is beholden to them, not to mention all those Ship Wizards and Ship Clerics from nations like Aundair. Whatever weather-mages Lhazaar has got, Lyrandar has got them tenfold - and they have Airships, Elemental Galleons, and Dragonmarks to boot. 4. The ability to sail against the wind is a decisive factor against any Sail-Age vessel. A Lhazaar fleet could be grounded in port because of the tide and the wind. If they throw out weather magic, Lyrandar's own weather mages will simply crush the effort. While the Lhazaar fleet lies helpless, Lyrandar fleets come in and bombard the living hell out of them. Normally, this would not be possible because of the risk that Lyrandar vessels would get crushed into the shore because of the wind and the tide, but Lyrandar vessels don't need the wind and the tide - they move with their own power and their own wind. It'll be a slaughter, plain and simple. Even in the open water, the prevailing wind is often the decisive factor in Sail Age conflicts. Britain was able to hold off the mighty Spanish Armada because they were able to get upwind. Well, you can never get upwind of a Lyrandar vessel with a Lesser Dragonmarked helmsman on board - they're always upwind. 5. Local territorial knowledge matters little when you wage war on the open sea. Lyrandar can simply quash whatever shipping goes into Lhazaar and they'll fall quickly. No need to land - at all. 6. Lyrandar's shipping vessels operated also in the war, or so I suspect - they are primarily a shipping house, after all. That means that their shipping fleet operates independently of their wartime resources - which they also used in the war. The postulated size of this Lyrandar fleet, including all the shipping vessels, far outmatches anything that can reasonably be assumed for any of the remaining Five Nations, and easily outnumbers the entirety of the Lhazaar fleet. It's no contest. 7. House Lyrandar is not in competition with House Orien's maritime shipping because House Orien doesn't have maritime shipping. Any maritime shipping that exists outside the Lhazaar Principalities is under the direct influence of the House because they control the continent-wide Guild that's necessary for maritime shipping at all - the Windwrights Guild. Thus, any Zilargan maritime shipping that occurs occurs within the aegis and the blessing of Lyrandar and no further. Monopolies don't compete - they dictate. Moreover, even if Lyrandar's shipping or Orien's shipping begins to affect each other, they would probably not compete directly. That's not the nature of monopolies. More than likely, they would stabilize the situation by forming a shipping cartel and jointly determine which goods are shipped to wherever else by whatever means at what price, carefully gauging each House's power based on politics, military (yes, military!), economics, and other such factors. There will be no free-market style competition here. 8. You need to realize that Lyrandar is more powerful than any worldwide maritime shipping corporation in the world today, relatively speaking. They have the military, they're a maritime shipping monopoly (that means they dictate the price - they don't have a profit margin so much as a cost margin), they have vast economic resources, they have political power outside whatever political power their monopolies and monies give them; heck, they probably have enclaves and embassies of their own - much like a nation. In fact, a Dragonmarked House member considers himself more a member of his House than a citizen of any nation, and in a setting wherein nationality is a big thing - that says a lot. It implies that Houses are at least on par with a nation, and Lyrandar is a more powerful house than most. Now, imagine Breland. Imgaine that instead of vast cities and land territories, it has ships and maritime enclaves and its territory was the sea. Imagine that all its vast economic and military power was invested in the sea, and only in the sea. Imagine this backed up by the very Prophecy, as it were, in the sense of Dragonmarks and Arcane and Divine sea power. Imagine that its very power as a nation were invested in its prestige as a sea power. Now imagine a small puny ragtag island nation against this. It won't even be a contest. Starving out the pirates would be a simple matter of arranging for no Five Nations Magewright or nation to trade with Lhazaar and then patrolling the shores with Airships and Elemental Galleons from their wartime fleet to weed out the Rogues. It'll be a cinch. More than likely, Vol will find a way to deal with Lyrandar to keep herself out of its ire, or else pressure Ryger to arrange a truce. Lyrandar has too much invested in its prestige as a sea power to allow a nobody pirate to plunder one of its ships without retribution. Let the pirates plunder a Zilargan vessel or any of the nation-based merchant shipping of the Five Nations. But a vessel plying the Lyrandar flag? No way. Any pirate that would have the nerve, the audacity, and, let's face it, the sheer might to tweak Lyrandar's nose would have to be truly exceptional, not a second rate wannabe like Prince Mika. |
| Bluebrush05-04-05, 10:05 AM | No time to examine all these in detail at the moment, but I'll just touch on this one point: 1. Lyrandar demonstrably is involved in wartime pursuits. Airships were designed primarily as war machines and they were designed primarily to function piloted by Lyrandar helmsmen and captains - ergo Lyrandar is involved in wartime pursuits, just not mercenary pursuits. What do you base that on? They're armed against flying threats, sure, but I don't think there's been much mention of thier use as weapons. Spoiler for City of Towers: Daine is quite surprised to see an airship used in a battle, and even wonders how someone could have gotten their hands on one, indicating it was uncommon to see them used in such a manner. Airships are a very useful method of transportation in Khorvaire. They can go anywhere, very fast. They have House Orien beat on travel time due to the fact they can travel in straight lines. The lightning rail doesn't even connect all the major cities, esepecially after the Mourning. Since the bridge between Thrane and Karrnath fell, the only way around was to sail Scion's Sound or to fly. After the Mourning, crossing Scion's Sound by air became a much more attractive option. Also note this is one reason Orien and Lyrandar are rivals to some degree. All the cargo that goes around the coast isn't cargo on the lightning rail or Orien's roads. |
| EvilDrPuma05-04-05, 10:13 AM | One quick note that I meant to put in the article but somehow missed: The three feats presented in this Dragonshard are actually taken from Stormwrack, an upcoming book in the Environment series (Frostburn, Sandstorm, etc). Obviously this book will be very useful for any sort of Lhazaar campaign, and the feats give you a sense of what to expect. But they aren't actually my work. I was given a small selection of feats from the book to choose from, and decided that with room for three, these seemed like the best choices - but there's certainly more interesting stuff to come! I appreciate the clarification...and if the rest of Stormwrack is as clever as Ship's Mage, it's got my money. |
| MavrickWeirdo05-04-05, 10:14 AM | I find it interesting that you believe that the seperate houses would stick together, but the Lhazaar Princes wouldn't (a shark is a shark). I will admit that in a head to head even confrontation Lyrandar magic is a significant advantage, but pirates don't fight fair either. If Lyrandar decided to play it "heavy-handed", then Lhazaar (as a sovereign nation) would declare, through house Sivis (and if you think intra-house-loyalty will prevent House Sivis from spreading jucie story then you don't understand how the houses work), that House Lyrandar had decended into Piracy :eek:, have overstepped the bounds of "house neutrality", and demand that the other nations who signed the Whitehall Treaty ban Lyrandar ships. Of course none of the 5 nations would take this seriously. Neither would the Gnomes or Valenar elves (exept those individuals who have relatives in the islands.) On the other hand Mror Holds, Q'Barra, & Daargun might support the ban. Droaam isn't part of the treaty, but might support the ban. Aerenal would probably ban them both rather than get involved. (Which cuts off Lyrandar's supply of the special woods needed to make their ships.) Let's assume that High Prince Ryger uses his contacts in the Mror Holds to gain their support of the ban. Most Dwarven exports are handles by house Orien. So House Lyrandar goes to House Orien and says, we need to stick together, I want you to stop carrying Dwarven Ore. My guess is the answer would be, "We'll stop carrying Dwarven Ore, if you give us the Shadow Marsh Dragonshards contracts." No dice. Meanwhile there are reports of Prince Mika being seen Everywhere, From Xen'drik to Lhazaar, at the same time. |
| EvilDrPuma05-04-05, 10:16 AM | The whole "pirates banding together to fight a common enemy" thing seems a little heavy handed and unrealistic to me. Sure, that would mean that they could resist invasion more easily, but then again, who wants to invade a no-resource land on the edge of nowhere with no strategic value whatsoever? Moreover, the whole "band together" thing seems problematic from a boundary sort of thing. What exactly constitutes "attacking a pirate?" For example, if Prince Mika Cloudreaver decides to attack a Lyrandar shipping vessel for some insane reason, she would have the ire of Lyrandar on her head. Most probably, Lyrandar would send a vessel or two to extract the necessary respect - you don't attack the most powerful power on the sea and not expect some kind of retribution. What then? The Pirates could band together and fight, but with the power of the Dragonmarks behind them and a continent-ful of shipping Magewrights to power their navy, Lyrandar can simply blockade Lhazaar into starvation if they wanted to be cute about it. Moreover, they'll have Airships and the support of their allies Orien and Cannith, if they seriously wanted to fight. Lhazaar wouldn't stand a chance. Obviously the cleaner alternative would be for Prince Rygar to talk with Lyrandar reps and let Cloudreaver and Lyrandar settle the matter for themselves - probably with Cloudreaver on the bad end of a losing battle. Allowing Lyrandar to protect Lyrandar specific ships with their clout frees the rest of the pirates to prey on nation-based and privateer shipping, which is a win-win situation for both sea powers. It's a sensible agreement to come to. We have thus an exception to the general band-together rule - attack Lyrandar shipping at your own risk. What other possible exceptions can there be? Is this exception even acceptable? Should Lyrandar be fair game to just any pirate? What do you think? I'll put it this way...from what can be determined about the actual politics around the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age, it isn't too great a stretch to read the Homeric epics as a story of (Greek) pirate principalities banding together. Stir gently. |
| The White Sorcerer05-04-05, 10:53 AM | the Whitehall Treaty I think you mean the Treaty of Thronehold. |
| Gishsarath05-04-05, 11:15 AM | I agree with Roxlimn on this matter. House Lyrander is a huge, powerful unified force on the open seas that practically have a stranglehold on maritime interests on Khorvaire. Although they aren't large enough to be considered a nation in their own right, many of the nations of Khorvaire rely upon their shipping to maintain a stable economy. The Lhazaar principilaties, on the other hand, aren't very powerful nor are they actually unified. They may work together when their goals sync up, but as a whole each of the Princes is scheming for more power for themselves and their respective fiefs. Such a quality can be exploited by a unified power like Lyrander (which is composed of mainly khoravar, who are naturally gifted at manipulating people). If anything, I see High Prince Rygar handing Prince Mika over to the Lyrander flotilla in order to rid himself of a potentially dangerous rival while at the same time gaining positive influence with the world's most powerful naval force. Lyrander has the resources, the size, and diplomatic might to crush the Lhazaar Principalities if it came down to it. The other Houses wouldn't turn against Lyrander if such a conflict were to occur, because all of them rely heavily on Lyrander's shipping monopoly. Even House Orien wouldn't turn on them, because if Lyrander was to "go down", they would suddenly have a huge burden dropped on their shoulders that they wouldn't be able to handle. The Five Nations would support Lyrander until the bitter end ... in part because Lyrander also controls the Raincaller's Guild, and the ability to control the weather is of huge importance to the agricultural survival of the countries of Khorvaire. |
| MavrickWeirdo05-04-05, 12:21 PM | I agree with Roxlimn on this matter. House Lyrander is a huge, powerful unified force on the open seas that practically have a stranglehold on maritime interests on Khorvaire. Although they aren't large enough to be considered a nation in their own right, many of the nations of Khorvaire rely upon their shipping to maintain a stable economy. The Lhazaar principilaties, on the other hand, aren't very powerful nor are they actually unified. They may work together when their goals sync up, but as a whole each of the Princes is scheming for more power for themselves and their respective fiefs. Such a quality can be exploited by a unified power like Lyrander (which is composed of mainly khoravar, who are naturally gifted at manipulating people). If anything, I see High Prince Rygar handing Prince Mika over to the Lyrander flotilla in order to rid himself of a potentially dangerous rival while at the same time gaining positive influence with the world's most powerful naval force. Lyrander has the resources, the size, and diplomatic might to crush the Lhazaar Principalities if it came down to it. The other Houses wouldn't turn against Lyrander if such a conflict were to occur, because all of them rely heavily on Lyrander's shipping monopoly. Even House Orien wouldn't turn on them, because if Lyrander was to "go down", they would suddenly have a huge burden dropped on their shoulders that they wouldn't be able to handle. The Five Nations would support Lyrander until the bitter end ... in part because Lyrander also controls the Raincaller's Guild, and the ability to control the weather is of huge importance to the agricultural survival of the countries of Khorvaire. If what you are saying is true, then House Lyrander becomes the "Elmister" of Eberron. |
| ENHenry05-04-05, 12:38 PM | If anything, I see High Prince Rygar handing Prince Mika over to the Lyrander flotilla in order to rid himself of a potentially dangerous rival while at the same time gaining positive influence with the world's most powerful naval force. To quote the recent Dragonshard: "Ties between the Principalities are tenuous, with alliances and feuds changing with the winds. But the princes still unite to defend a prince against an outsider. It is this loyalty that serves as a shield for raiders like Prince Mika's Cloudreavers; if one of the Five Nations actually sent a fleet into the Principalities, they would soon face an alliance of princes." Why would Ryger or any other prince cheerfully bend over for the House? Beyond this being the the point when they would be branded unworthy by their own people, and a cheeky subordinate or another prince gladly challenging them for the right to rule for showing such weakness against their internal code; they would further justy as well know that House Lyrandar considers them "just another backwoods pirate," same as they consider the other princes, and would hold them in no special regard in the future other than on a temporary basis. There are squabbles in the family, and jockeying for power, but don't DARE let someone outside the family threaten them... Lyrander has the resources, the size, and diplomatic might to crush the Lhazaar Principalities if it came down to it. I have to wonder if you're not overestimating the might of any one Dragonmark House, here. These guys are predominantly merchants and diplomats, not soldiers. Even if they DO field a military force, it's either (1) partly Deneith Soldiers, or (2) a fairly small percentage of their House. I don't see any book references about these guys and gals fielding their own full armies. Even House Orien wouldn't turn on them, because if Lyrander was to "go down", they would suddenly have a huge burden dropped on their shoulders that they wouldn't be able to handle. Like Fedex "glumly" took the slack when UPS had a strike back in the mid-1990's? I remember that well, and while Fedex was overworked, they also made MAJOR MONEY for the period that strike was on. And had the strike continued long enough, they would have simply expanded their work force, same as Orien would do in same circumstances. Orien is not likely to actively oppose them, but its Heads would just as well note the conflict that Lyrandar is pursuing, and say, "oh, Hetman X, please recruit some additional porters for next month, and step up Lightning Rail Schedules. We may need them." ;) The Five Nations would support Lyrander until the bitter end ... in part because Lyrander also controls the Raincaller's Guild, and the ability to control the weather is of huge importance to the agricultural survival of the countries of Khorvaire. I don't know, but it sounds like Lyrandar refusing services just because other nations won't pursue them in a vengance war is slitting their own throat, to me. |
| Gishsarath05-04-05, 02:25 PM | If what you are saying is true, then House Lyrander becomes the "Elmister" of Eberron. Calling House Lyrander "Elminster" is a bit of hyperbole, don't you think? House Lyrander is huge institution that deals with the weather, maritime, and aerial transport and shipping. Imagine the merchant marine combined with every major airline in our modern world, and you got a good grasp of what the Windwright's guild represents in Eberron. This gives them a lot of power, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that they are like Elminster. Well, unless the House Matriarch is banging one of the Sovereign Host ... or she takes her vacations in hell or something. To quote the recent Dragonshard: "Ties between the Principalities are tenuous, with alliances and feuds changing with the winds. But the princes still unite to defend a prince against an outsider. It is this loyalty that serves as a shield for raiders like Prince Mika's Cloudreavers; if one of the Five Nations actually sent a fleet into the Principalities, they would soon face an alliance of princes." Why would Ryger or any other prince cheerfully bend over for the House? Beyond this being the the point when they would be branded unworthy by their own people, and a cheeky subordinate or another prince gladly challenging them for the right to rule for showing such weakness against their internal code; they would further justy as well know that House Lyrandar considers them "just another backwoods pirate," same as they consider the other princes, and would hold them in no special regard in the future other than on a temporary basis. There are squabbles in the family, and jockeying for power, but don't DARE let someone outside the family threaten them... If Prince Mika Cloudreaver is endangering the fledgeling "nation" of Lhazaar by antagonizing House Lyrander, I'm sure that Rygar and the other princes would oust her before engaging in a costly naval "war" with a bunch of khoravar who sail in elemental galleons and can control the weather. The Princes may be pirate-lords, but they aren't stupid ... We are assuming, of course, that the hostilities were started by Prince Mika and it wasn't Lyrander aggression. I have to wonder if you're not overestimating the might of any one Dragonmark House, here. These guys are predominantly merchants and diplomats, not soldiers. Even if they DO field a military force, it's either (1) partly Deneith Soldiers, or (2) a fairly small percentage of their House. I don't see any book references about these guys and gals fielding their own full armies. I'm guessing that they probably have private military forces. After all, there was a House War (the War of the Mark). Perhaps you are undestimating the Dragonmarked Houses. These guys didn't just get dragonmarks and calmly start a mercantile empire free from the restrictions placed upon them by disparate kingdoms. I'm sure that all of the Houses used strong handed tactics at one point or another in order to create the monopolies that exist today. Each House undoubtedly has a private military force that it can field to protect its immediate interests, they have enough money to do so. Since House Lyrander is an organization that makes its bread and butter engaging in an incredibly dangerous business, it would be naive to assume that they are all "diplomats". Not only do Lyrander galleons have to worry about pirates, but they have to deal with sauhaugin, locathah, merrow, sea hags, krakens, giant squid and a plethora of other oceanic menaces. They have navy. It would be unrealistic of them not too. Like Fedex "glumly" took the slack when UPS had a strike back in the mid-1990's? I remember that well, and while Fedex was overworked, they also made MAJOR MONEY for the period that strike was on. And had the strike continued long enough, they would have simply expanded their work force, same as Orien would do in same circumstances. Orien is not likely to actively oppose them, but its Heads would just as well note the conflict that Lyrandar is pursuing, and say, "oh, Hetman X, please recruit some additional porters for next month, and step up Lightning Rail Schedules. We may need them. You're analogy is a little flawed. There are a plethora of shipping services available in the United States and abroad, from big businesses like UPS to smaller independant couriers. In Khorvaire, there are two groups who have the power. House Orien and House Lyrander ... and both are competing over one niche. If Lyrander was to fall apart, the "slack" that House Orien would be forced to pick up would be an immense economical burden that Orien wouldn't be able to field or finance. House Orien are the masters of overland shipping, they are pretty lacking when it comes to maritime or airbone interests. I don't know, but it sounds like Lyrandar refusing services just because other nations won't pursue them in a vengance war is slitting their own throat, to me. Punishing piracy isn't a "vengeance war", it is called upholding the law. In the Carribean during the "Golden Age of Piracy", pirates were to be executed without trial. The civilized nations would realize that if they didn't support Lyrander in punishing piracy, that it would only be encouraging extremely bad behavior. The more dangerous the waters, the more soldiers Lyrander would have to train and employ to protect valauble cargo, and thus the more expensive their services. And House Lyrander wouldn't refuse the services of their Raincaller's Guild, but the prices would undoubtedly rise due to the problems at sea. Which means potential food shortage problems for places that rely upon Lyrander's weather services. |
| MavrickWeirdo05-04-05, 02:54 PM | I'm guessing that they probably have private military forces. After all, there was a House War (the War of the Mark). "The War of the Mark" was not a House War. The 10 Dragonmarked Houses (there were only 10 at the time) joined forces to hunt down people with Aberrant Dragonmarks (some of whom were their own kin). In many ways it was a similar to when The Church of the Silver Flame hunting down Lycanthrops. It was not like the Montagues and Capulets. I do believe that most Lyrander ships are well equipt for combat. However because they are involved in trade over such a broad area, then that would mean that they could easily be spread too thin. Concentrate thier forces on Lhazaar, and suddenly they start loosing ships around Xen'drik and the Demon Wastes. After all they also have to deal with sauhaugin, locathah, merrow, sea hags, krakens, giant squid and a plethora of other oceanic menaces. :D |
| ENHenry05-04-05, 03:58 PM | If Prince Mika Cloudreaver is endangering the fledgeling "nation" of Lhazaar...I'm sure that Rygar and the other princes would oust her before engaging in a costly naval "war" with a bunch of khoravar who sail in elemental galleons and can control the weather. The Princes may be pirate-lords, but they aren't stupid ... I still can't dismiss the whole "they will defend their own" so easily, whether they started it or not. In the end, House Lyrandar shows up on their doorstep and says, "If you cut a deal with us and aid us to capture Prince Mika, we'll give you special trade concessions," Any other prince's likely answer is, "I'm afraid I can't. I have no special connections to Mika." If they say, "bolster our forces to capture her," then a prince's answer is likely to be, "I'm sorry, I can't spare them," and if they threaten then it's likely, "Get out of my waters", and they likely add trade and diplomatic pressure of their own. Again, Lyrandar would collectively see no one Prince as better than any other - Rygar nor any of the other princes are some bastion of goodwill. However, we are informed that all the Princes hang together against all outside forces, so we do have that to go on. How is Mika threatening the Principalities' future, again? Are the other Thronehold nations going to be idle while Lyrandar threatens a nonagressive member like Regalport? To me, that's like the U.S. declaring war on Canada because they can't stop a Canadian citizen from coming over and robbing American banks. I'm guessing that they probably have private military forces. After all, there was a House War (the War of the Mark)... Perhaps you are undestimating the Dragonmarked Houses. These guys didn't just get dragonmarks and calmly start a mercantile empire free from the restrictions placed upon them by disparate kingdoms. I'm sure that all of the Houses used strong handed tactics at one point or another in order to create the monopolies that exist today. Each House undoubtedly has a private military force that it can field to protect its immediate interests, they have enough money to do so. Since House Lyrander is an organization that makes its bread and butter engaging in an incredibly dangerous business, it would be naive to assume that they are all "diplomats". Not only do Lyrander galleons have to worry about pirates, but they have to deal with sauhaugin, locathah, merrow, sea hags, krakens, giant squid and a plethora of other oceanic menaces. They have navy. It would be unrealistic of them not too. However, this suggests that events hundreds of years ago dictates their force levels now. The War of the Mark (an internal war, as MaverickWeirdo says) was hundreds of years ago, as was their initial periods of forging new routes and defending against competitions. As the monopoly becomes cemented, the need for such I would imagine goes down. Surely they have forces now, but again - they are as likely as anyone to use Deneith's services to supplement, and their main forces are aeronauts and sailors, not marines and grunts. ...If Lyrander was to fall apart, the "slack" that House Orien would be forced to pick up would be an immense economical burden that Orien wouldn't be able to field or finance. House Orien are the masters of overland shipping, they are pretty lacking when it comes to maritime or airbone interests. What forced? Smaller companies DO operate in Knorvaire - heck, that would be an interesting adventure opportunities if there was a fortune to be made in making runs that Lyrandar couldn't make any more! They wouldn't be "forced" to pick up the slack any more than any other company in a modern day society - the deliveries just wouldn't get made, and after a period of chaos, it would be sorted out between Orien, whatever remained of House Lyrandar after they ousted the leaders who engaged in such foolishness that would destroy them, and smaller companies and charters. Punishing piracy isn't a "vengeance war", it is called upholding the law. In the Carribean during the "Golden Age of Piracy", pirates were to be executed without trial. The civilized nations would realize that if they didn't support Lyrander in punishing piracy, that it would only be encouraging extremely bad behavior. The more dangerous the waters, the more soldiers Lyrander would have to train and employ to protect valauble cargo, and thus the more expensive their services. And House Lyrander wouldn't refuse the services of their Raincaller's Guild, but the prices would undoubtedly rise due to the problems at sea. Which means potential food shortage problems for places that rely upon Lyrander's weather services. All that over one pirate? Now, if ALL the Princes of the Lhazaar got together and staged heavy coordinated raiding, then I can surely see an alliance as you describe, because it would curtail shipping. But over one Prince getting rambunctious, I couldn't see it. It's the difference between the aforementioned Canadian Bank robber, and Canada invading. (Actually, a better analogy might be a Syrian bank robber robbing Israeli banks, but I don't want to stray too far into real-world politics to make my point.) |
| Hellcow05-04-05, 04:26 PM | 1. Lyrandar demonstrably is involved in wartime pursuits. Airships were designed primarily as war machines... Incorrect. Airships used in battle were the exception, not the rule. They were developed during the Last War, but used primarily for transportation. Page 267 of the ECS specifically notes that Lyrandar was not in the business of producing air-battleships. And don't forget that you don't have to have the Mark of Storms to control an airship - it's hard to do without it, but it is possible. 4. The ability to sail against the wind is a decisive factor against any Sail-Age vessel. A Lhazaar fleet could be grounded in port because of the tide and the wind. If they throw out weather magic, Lyrandar's own weather mages will simply crush the effort. While the Lhazaar fleet lies helpless, Lyrandar fleets come in and bombard the living hell out of them. You're looking at this the wrong way, Roxlimn. The point is that pirates DO prey on Lyrandar vessels. So the question is, since a Lyrandar heir can control the winds, HOW do they do it? What does Prince Mika have up her sleeve that HAS kept Lyrandar from crushing her? Eberron is a world of magic; Lyrandar may have a specialty, but the Lhazaar have lived on the seas since before the Mark of Storm appeared, and they have their own magical traditions. Some of this will be discussed in part two of this Dragonshard, which among other things specifically addresses the Cloudreavers. Also, don't forget, not every Lyrandar vessel is an elemental galleon, and many Lyrandar heirs can only produce gust of wind! Captains with the greater mark are few and far between, not manning every ship of the line. Whereas Mika's fleet is small, but every vessel is outfitted for battle. Mika will choose her fights, and does use magic to aid her. So the question you should be asking is HOW pirates can prey on Lyrandar with all the power Lyrandar has, as opposed to dismissing the prospect out of hand. You are correct, if she can't match the wind, Mika would be doomed - so what does she do? (Hint: "Cloudreaver" is more than just a name...) Not to mention the idea that there are captains with the Mark of Storm among the Lhazaar - something else that will be addressed in the next article. Overall, I agree with you. The Dragonmarked houses may be the greatest powers of the modern age. But that doesn't make them immune to injury. The superpowers of the world can still suffer terrorist attacks. If a Lyrandar vessel is sunk with all hands, who's to say who was responsible? Perhaps it was a kraken, a storm, or a pirate. These are the risks of shipping - and war is itself an expense. I certainly believe that Lyrandar has its own warships that will seek to eliminate pirates or accompany critical cargoes - but they can't be everywhere at once, and the Cloudreavers won't strike a target they don't feel they can take. And they have centuries of experience in making these judgments. One other critical point: Don't forget that thanks to the Treaty of Galifar, Lyrandar lacks land, and while the heirs may consider themselves citizens of no land, that doesn't extend to every Lyrandar crewman. Lyrandar ships are captained and commanded by heirs of the house, but by necessity much of the crew are drawn from whatever nation they happen to be from. Their loyalty is to gold more than anything else. A particular Lyrandar warship might be entirely manned by children of the house, but overall the house *doesn't* have the population to match the navy of Breland; it may have the ships, but it's not like the sailors of those ships would all sign on for a war against Lhazaar or any other nation without question. Lyrandar may be Microsoft, but if Microsoft descided to conquer Washington state, some of the employees might decide it was time to go elsewhere. Now, if Zorlan d'Cannith starting building warforged again, formed an alliance with Lyrandar and created a fleet of ships captained by Lyrandar heirs and manned by warforged, you might see the corporate conquest begin... |
| Hellcow05-04-05, 05:29 PM | Oh, and just as a side note, the existence of sahuagin does not mean that shipping requires massive military force - it simply means that you need to have some form of protection against attack. Lyrandar actually has economic arrangements with the sahuagin whose territories lie across its major shipping lanes. Like, say, Microsoft, Lyrandar generally uses gold and negotiation in place of physical force. The treaty of Galifar - the agreement between Galifar I and the houses - specifically forbids the houses maintaining significant military forces, with the exception of House Deneith. Until the Last War, House Lyrandar was expected to rely on the protection of the navy of Galifar, and if it built up a military fleet of its own it would have been seen as a threat. Now, with the disolution of Galifar, many of the houses believe that the treaty no longer binds them - Hence you get people like Zorlan or Halea d'Cannith, and their counterparts in other houses. And since there is no longer a unified Galifar navy, Lyrandar must see to its own protection more than it did. Nonetheless, building up a naval force to match that of one of the Five Nations would be a new step, and something that the nations could see as a threat; it's up to you to decide what the consequences of this would be. Lyrandar could easily counter with economic sanctions - but does it want to start this war? |
| Gurv05-04-05, 05:55 PM | Oh, and just as a side note, the existence of sahuagin does not mean that shipping requires massive military force - it simply means that you need to have some form of protection against attack. Lyrandar actually has economic arrangements with the sahuagin whose territories lie across its major shipping lanes. Like, say, Microsoft, Lyrandar generally uses gold and negotiation in place of physical force. Eh? A solution without violence? I don't get it. That has been the hardest part about Eberron: showing players who are used to other ways of thinking to accept that places like Droaam, or even Darguun, can be accepted. I guess it will just take time. Back OT: I got the feeling that Lyrandar didn't have a strong presence in the Principalities. Orien, Thuranni, and Ghallandra are mentioned in Regalport, with Orien seeming especially in with Prince Rygar and Thuranni having their home base there since they broke off from Phiarlan. As others have pointed out, there isn't really much of value in the Lhazaar, and that leads to less House influence. Although it might seem that Lyrandar would fit in well there, the fact of the matter is that they don't have anything to offer that the Lhazaar doesn't already have. The other Houses can come to them with things that they need or want, but not Lyrandar. That doesn't mean that Lyrandar has nothing to offer, just that what they have isn't as rare in the Principalities. |
| Hellcow05-04-05, 06:38 PM | Back OT: I got the feeling that Lyrandar didn't have a strong presence in the Principalities. Indeed; page 235 of the ECS notes that they "find few opportunities in the Lhazaar Principalities"... and one more reason for this will be shown in part two of the article. |
| Neofish05-04-05, 06:45 PM | Isn't Lyrander mad at Orien for hiring Lhazzar pirates as couriors..? |
| Bluebrush05-04-05, 07:24 PM | Just a note, in the Sharn book it says the amabassadors of the princes spend a lot of time denying piracy charges. This could be another reason for Lyrandar to be unable to retaliate. It'd look bad to attack someone without evidence. Then again, there's the possibility that it just doesn't happen often, since pirates know who to target and avoid messing with more powerful opponents. Wolves hunt rabbits (or whatever) rather than dragons. |
| zentr05-04-05, 08:38 PM | Not to sidestep the excellent discussion...but... I just hope the Dragonshards get published together in paper form (at least until we get a decent ebook reader I can curl up in bed and read with). The Dragonshards have the kind of specific info I want in setting supplements. Ok, back to the discussion. |
| Vharuck05-04-05, 08:56 PM | Why not just print them out? |
| Gurv05-04-05, 10:05 PM | Isn't Lyrander mad at Orien for hiring Lhazzar pirates as couriors..? I think the idea of the Dragonmarked Houses working together is being over-estimated. They do work together, or at least try not to get in each others way all the time. They are diplomatic because they recognize that fighting will bring losses to them all. And they have things like The Twelve to get the most out cooperation. But at the same time, they compete with each other too. House Orien and House Lyrandar are especially prone to this, since they both transport goods and people. Sure, they're not enemies or anything, and a package being delivered a long distance might pass through both their hands. But they do compete, and the Dragonmarked Houses don't always see eye-to-eye. Most likely, the get into more conflicts than anyone else, but are just so established, with treaties and agreements, that they resolve them without coming to blows. But I don't think that others would automatically show up to aid one House having business problems in an area. |
| Neofish05-04-05, 10:37 PM | I think the idea of the Dragonmarked Houses working together is be over-estimated. They do work together, or at least try not to get in each others way all the time. They are diplomatic because they recognize that fighting will bring losses to them all. They have things like The Twelve to get the most out cooperation. But at the same time, they compete with each other too. House Orien and House Lyrandar are especially prone to this, since they both transport goods and people. Sure, they're not enemies or anything, and a package being delivered a long distance might pass through both their hands. But they do compete, and the Dragonmarked Houses don't always see eye-to-eye. Most likely, the get into more conflicts than anyone else, but are just so established, with treaties and agreements, that they resolve them without coming to blows. But I don't think that others would automatically show up to aid one House having business problems in an area. I understand what your saying, but isn't Orien hiring Lhazzar pirates to steal/extort from Lyrander ships, in order to capture the market in coastal shipping by spreading propaganda that Lyrander ships arn't able to the task..? What I want to know is whether or not the high prince is in on it or not... |
| Gurv05-04-05, 11:04 PM | I understand what your saying, but isn't Orien hiring Lhazzar pirates to steal/extort from Lyrander ships, in order to capture the market in coastal shipping by spreading propaganda that Lyrander ships arn't able to the task..? I didn't see anything saying that Orien was hiring pirates to do that. I've seen that Orien works with the High Prince, but nothing saying that they help single out House Lyrandar as targets for piracy. That is the thing about remaining neutral...House Orien works with the Seadragons, doing legitimate business. If the Seadragons decide to cause trouble for Lyrandar, then House Orien doesn't get involved. They stay neutral. They don't want to lose business with the High Prince by siding with Lyrandar, and they don't want to anger Lyrandar by actively aiding the pirates. The continue to do exactly as they were doing before. The same thing happened during the Last War. The Dragonmarked Houses don't side with anyone, and they don't side against anyone. The work with each other when it benefits them, and they compete when it doesn't. They have agreements restricting both of those things, so that a disagreement doesn't destroy them both. But the agreements do not go so far as to unite them into some cohesive whole that would side against a nation or group. Now, it might make for an interesting adventure to have some Orien sabotage of a Lyrandar interest that they wanted more control over, or vice versa. But it would be an adventure because that isn't supposed to happen. It would also be a local thing: not everything that happens within a House is controlled from the main enclaves. It is entirely possible that some regional leader might try to increase his production with a little unethical competition strategy. |
| Hellcow05-05-05, 03:52 AM | I think the idea of the Dragonmarked Houses working together is being over-estimated. They do work together... But at the same time, they compete with each other too. Just to point out another obvious interhouse conflict, House Tharashk's dealings with Droaam are threatening House Deneith's mercenary monopoly. House Phiarlan and House Thuranni are often at odds, though each provides its own specialty services. Also, bear in mind that the houses themselves are not monolithic, unified forces, with House Cannith being a prime example of this; individual barons may pursue personal agendas that may be at odds with the house, whether out of a desire to gain power or a belief that their actions will benefit the house in the long run. |
| Gurv05-05-05, 08:44 AM | How do they define piracy in the Lhazzar? When you have a culture made up of pirates, how does that work? It reminds me of the line in Pirates of the Caribbean when one cursed pirate points out to the other cursed pirate that the heroes are stealing the Black Pearl. His fist-shaking answer: "Bloody Pirates!!!" I'm sure the answer is something like "Not everyone in the Lhazzar is a pirate", but since even the High Prince is at least a part-time pirate, how is piracy treated? Are they hung without a trial? Considered the most vile creatures imaginable? Or are they considered as heroes and rolemodels? |
| Siran Dunmorgan05-05-05, 01:04 PM | How do they define piracy in the Lhazzar? When you have a culture made up of pirates, how does that work? Many years ago in southern Sarlona, before the Riedrans conquered pretty much everything, there was a tribe of folk called the Kirish'kai that were known by their neighbors as cattle thieves—incorrigible cattle thieves; no matter how many of them were left hanging on trees or staked out on wooden Xs as a warning, they would still go and steal cattle, frequently making large-scale raids of it. Well, it turned out eventually that the problem was one of perspective: in the oldest myths of the tribe, they were told that in ancient days Balinor and Kol Korran—they didn't call them by those names, but those were the gods they meant—had met and decided that all the cattle in the world belonged to the Kirish'kai. But the Keeper and the Traveler—again, they call them by other names—arranged with the fiendish enemies of the Kirish'kai to steal the cattle and give them to the other tribes of southern Sarlona. What the other tribes saw as "thievery" was simply a part of an ages-long effort by the Kirish'kai to take back what had been stolen from them at the dawn of time.[1] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In much the same way, the notion of rule by strength and the morality that Kol Korran's bounty belongs to those who can take and hold it for themselves is very strong in the Principalities. "Pirate" is not an honorific: it's an occupation, and one with approximately the same status as "soldier" in the Five Nations, or "hunter" among the Talentae. A talented pirate is indeed regarded as something of a hero, especially if they conduct themselves with decorum and respect for their fellows, but a bloodthirsty cutthroat will be regarded as something of a menace, not least because he is likely to turn on his fellows. When you're at sea, all you have is your fellow sailors, and you have to depend on them. The greatest problem with cultures that practice an ethos of "if I can take it away from you, you didn't deserve to have it in the first place" is that they are not generally productive in their own right, i.e., they spend most of their time focused on taking, rather than making. This yields a culture ultimately at the mercy of the makers. Some—the High Prince among them—understand this issue and are attempting to deal with it by winning some level of legitimacy for the Principalities. —Siran Dunmorgan [1] No, I'm not entirely making this up. This is another example of taking a real-world situation and dressing it in Eberron clothes for the sake of illustration. Those of you who care to search the anthropological literature should be able to find the real-world analogue of the Kirish'kai without too much trouble. |
| Hellcow05-05-05, 04:13 PM | I'm with Siran. Whether or not you use his myth (and since the people of the Principalities are drawn from diverse sources, this could apply to a certain group among them), everything after the ~~~~s fits with my view of the Principalities. |
| treehouse91605-05-05, 04:25 PM | Back on the subject of the Cloudreaver vs. Lyrandar scenario: I tend to agree with those who have said that Lyrandar wouldn't openly move against a strong pirate fleet like the Cloudreavers, for reasons both political and practical. However, it makes the perfect adventure hook for an adventuring party, as Lyrandar agents begin quietly looking for someone with no direct ties to their organization to deal with Prince Mika. |
| Sucros05-05-05, 10:16 PM | When I think of Lyrandar and Orien disputing, I imagine it'd be along the same lines as real world disputes between Canada and the USA, or any other pair of allied nations. On the high up levels, the conflict resolution would likely be a long, boring, string of discussions and debates that would take years to work out. I do however thing that this doesn't stop minor barons from thurrani and phialan from trying to nix each other when their respected subordinates end up competing at cross purposes. |
| Just another user05-06-05, 03:34 AM | Lyrandar is first of anything a commercial house, I'm sure if it really wanted it could win a war with Lhazar, even if not easily, but it would be tremendously expensive. It would need a damn good reason to try something like that, something like a menace to the existance of the house, not simply some ships that could have (or could have not) been plundered by pirates. |
| Roxlimn05-06-05, 08:38 AM | Wow. I can't believe all that hardlining worked! :) I got Hellcow to post! :D I can't believe it! There's quite a lot of new stuff, too. originally posted by Hellcow: Sorry, Keith, but I can't help but try to squeeze out more cool info! Incorrect. Airships used in battle were the exception, not the rule. They were developed during the Last War, but used primarily for transportation. Page 267 of the ECS specifically notes that Lyrandar was not in the business of producing air-battleships. And don't forget that you don't have to have the Mark of Storms to control an airship - it's hard to do without it, but it is possible. True, but some of the online content about Airships implied that they were developed for use in the Last War as implements of war. We even have material with Airship borne Archers firing on ground based troops. That's as direct a battle use as I can imagine. Airhips specifically not being used in battle as the rule would be a new thing for me in the history of Airships. Also, you imply that you don't need Lyrandar to pilot an Airship. This is fundamentally obvious, but are there other factions with significant Airship presence? Why does Lyrandar tolerate this? Does this not eat into Lyrandar's power? Lyrandar may have a specialty, but the Lhazaar have lived on the seas since before the Mark of Storm appeared, and they have their own magical traditions. Some of this will be discussed in part two of this Dragonshard, which among other things specifically addresses the Cloudreavers. Super cool! Also, don't forget, not every Lyrandar vessel is an elemental galleon, and many Lyrandar heirs can only produce gust of wind! Captains with the greater mark are few and far between, not manning every ship of the line. Well, no, but you only need a Lesser Dragonmark to have wind's favor and that's quite a ways more powerful than a simple gust of wind. Even just wind's favor is a very powerful advantage against a Sail Age vessel. Whereas Mika's fleet is small, but every vessel is outfitted for battle. Mika will choose her fights, and does use magic to aid her. So the question you should be asking is HOW pirates can prey on Lyrandar with all the power Lyrandar has, as opposed to dismissing the prospect out of hand. You are correct, if she can't match the wind, Mika would be doomed - so what does she do? (Hint: "Cloudreaver" is more than just a name...) Ah, but I wasn't dismissing the prospect out of hand. I was saying that a pirate would need to be exceptionally strong in order to prey on Lyrandar ships and expect of get away with it. Is Prince Mika one of these exceptionally strong pirates? Do Lyrandar ships simply fall to just any pirate? If so, what right do they have to call themselves the House of Storms? Even though I was asking myself that question, I was also considering the balance of power. I had thought that Lyrandar, with their dragonmarks and their Ship Mages and Ship Clerics would be the preeminent power on the seas. Apparently, they're not. Or are they? It's not a clear thing at this point. Not to mention the idea that there are captains with the Mark of Storm among the Lhazaar - something else that will be addressed in the next article. Now that would be a new development. Is this indicative of a general shift of power away from the Houses? If Marks are found outside the Houses, what do they represent? Is this unique for the Mark of Storms? For example, is the Mark of Detection also found outside the respective Dragonmarked House? I can see where some rogue individuals would exist outside the Houses, but in general, this does not seem to be consistent with House power. House power, IMO, would rely on a ruthless elimination or integration of all like powers. If Cannith were to have word of a Skyforge anywhere on Khorvaire, they would expend strength and power to bring it into the fold, or else destroy it. To do otherwise would compromise their power. I think Lyrandar would have to behave in much the same way. I certainly believe that Lyrandar has its own warships that will seek to eliminate pirates or accompany critical cargoes - but they can't be everywhere at once, and the Cloudreavers won't strike a target they don't feel they can take. And they have centuries of experience in making these judgments. Again, another point of Dragonmarked House concept in which it seems my presumptions were different from your vision. If Lyrandar had warships, I would venture to propose that they would only extend actual ship operation only insofar as their fleet can protect it, whether by presence or by prestige, as the British and the Spanish did in their heyday. Any profit they could make from extending their personal operations outside the protection of their prestige and power would simply cost them the reputation, and that's not something you can buy with crass monies. Better to farm those out to local shipping and get your cut through the Guild operations, no? That way, you get the money, and you get the rep. It's a win-win deal. Thus, any attack on a Lyrandar Ship would be a serious affair, kind of like attacking a British Ship of the Line, not just another fly-by-night Merchantman. Viewed from another way, if you're making oodles of profit from "special cargo" and can take a cut of the rest of the market, why sacrifice your asking price and political clout? A particular Lyrandar warship might be entirely manned by children of the house, but overall the house *doesn't* have the population to match the navy of Breland; it may have the ships, but it's not like the sailors of those ships would all sign on for a war against Lhazaar or any other nation without question. Lyrandar may be Microsoft, but if Microsoft descided to conquer Washington state, some of the employees might decide it was time to go elsewhere. Necessarily true. Not the implication that Lyrandar's fleet is smaller than Breland's fleet. It may or may not be true, but the implication is there. This returns to the political structure of the Guild. In many ways, Guild members from medieval times counted themselves members of their guild more than they were a member of their nations, and their guilds not only provided them with economic and professional protection, but political protection as well. This is shown in such works as Mercedes Lackey's Oathbound series and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. This kind of Guild identification stood against Clan and House association - being an alternative to both King and Clan in a world where nationalism was centuries away. A Guildsman wouldn't necessarily choose Guild over immediate kin, but certainly, a certain loyalty was expected when it was against distant kin, or even nobility and king. I guess my question would be: how much does the Eberron Guild adhere to the traditional meanings of what a Guild did and was, and how much is it different? In the case of a strictly traditional Guild, Lyrandar could rightly expect every single Guildsman of the Windwrights guild to stand with it against Lhazaar, except of course, native Lhazaarites. Breland and other nations need not get involved in the matter at all. Saying that most Guildsmen are loyal only to the gold and have several layers of other loyalties beyond that says a lot about the Eberron Guild and reduces the power of Dragonmarked Houses significantly as against my previous estimation. You see, you're directly comparing Lyrandar to Microsoft. This is not how I thought it would be, based on the implications of what Merchant Houses, Guilds, and monopolies are and were. As I thought, Lyrandar would be much closer to something like a worldwide monopoly combining every single overnight delivery and sea shipping service combined with the British naval forces and a nation-like unity and identity. This is significantly more powerful. And since there is no longer a unified Galifar navy, Lyrandar must see to its own protection more than it did. Nonetheless, building up a naval force to match that of one of the Five Nations would be a new step, and something that the nations could see as a threat; it's up to you to decide what the consequences of this would be. Lyrandar could easily counter with economic sanctions - but does it want to start this war? That's a good question. And it's a significant statement. Apparently, Lyrandar is more or less a sitting duck as far as military power is concerned. The thing I'm wondering at here is that if any two-bit human pirate can prey regularly on Lyrandar vessels, what's to prevent everyone else preying on sea shipping wholesale? Lyrandar controls the Windwrights Guild and the Mark of Storms. Almost by definition, its navy would be more powerful than anyone else's in the continent. In the Age of Sail, wind power is sea power, and Lyrandar supposedly has this in spades. It doesn't really need a whole lot of ships to do this, either. A couple ships with independent power will decimate a whole armada of Sail Age vessels. If the nations were to view Lyrandar's sea power as a threat, they would probably do so almost regardless of how much obvious firepower Lyrandar is presenting. Making this power obvious instead of implied is a simple matter, and seeing as no one is defending Lyrandar interests for close to a hundred years now, a necessary one. Since the Houses are supposedly neutral, this would be, at best, a trivial matter, especially compared to Thrane's army parked outside your doorstep ready to march. It's necessary for Lyrandar to develop this power to its logical conclusion and I don't understand how any sane ruler would concern himself with this when he's got more pressing matters to attend to. In the same vein, Sivis, Deneith, Vadalis, and all the other Dragonmarked Houses would have developed their powers also. On Lyrandar presence in the Principalities: This is more understandable. Pirates are not very likely to trust outsiders, and this is moreover emphasized by clannish behavior. Even if Lyrandar ships were invincible, Lyrandar would have no reason to port in Lhazaar simply because no one would hire them! It would be a point of pride for a seagoing people to provide their own seabound shipping, after all. |
| Roxlimn05-06-05, 08:50 AM | Now, see Hellcow, this I have a problem with: originally posted by Gurv: But at the same time, they compete with each other too. House Orien and House Lyrandar are especially prone to this, since they both transport goods and people. Sure, they're not enemies or anything, and a package being delivered a long distance might pass through both their hands. But they do compete, and the Dragonmarked Houses don't always see eye-to-eye. Now, I don't have a problem with Houses not seeing eye-to-eye. In fact, that should happen just as often as not. The main problem I see here is the competing portion. So are they or are they not monopolies? Are they Merchant Houses or just Corporations with fancy names? If 2 monopolies ever got into a semi-direct competition with each other, the absolute last thing they would try to do is compete. That's because competition is bad for business. It's good for the consumer, yes, but then again, the consumer isn't really the focus on monopoly type setups. First, they would try to do away with one another, with vicious wars, both economic and military. Needless to say, economic would most likely be the war scenario here. If this is not possible, they would come to an agreement to price things jointly and generally do business amicably, if not altogether in a friendly manner. This is called a cartel and is the most likely scenario when two nonstate controlled monopolies tangle over a product. That means that unless they had some really personal issues on the line, Orien and Lyrandar, over the course of several hundred years, would most likely come to view joint business as the rule rather than the exception and they would most likely be some of the closer of the merchant houses rather than at each other's throats. Far from competing and risking ruin and loss, they would have worked out long and complex rules of engagement over who has precedence where and for what. Even if they come to an impasse, competition would probably be the furtherest thought from their minds. |
| Hellcow05-06-05, 06:03 PM | True, but some of the online content about Airships implied that they were developed for use in the Last War as implements of war. We even have material with Airship borne Archers firing on ground based troops. That's as direct a battle use as I can imagine. And you have the airship being brought to the ground with dispel magic. That's the danger of using them in battle; when it comes to it, they are fairly fragile, since abjurers are an important part of any major army. Lyrandar is working on ways to protect airships from dispel effects, and it is certainly likely that you will see military airships in the future. But because of this, only a few airships were used in battle in the Last War, and Lyrandar did not produce armored vessels. Hence the statement in the ECS that Lyrandar did not produce warships: airships were used for troop transport and as platforms for archers or spellcasters, but the ships themselves were not specifically designed for war. Also, you imply that you don't need Lyrandar to pilot an Airship. This is fundamentally obvious, but are there other factions with significant Airship presence? Why does Lyrandar tolerate this? Does this not eat into Lyrandar's power? Well, I don't need to imply it - it's clearly stated on page 267 of the ECS. However, it is difficult. Furthermore, since Lyrandar is wealthy and powerful, it's in the interests of the Zil shipwrights to keep them happy. So no, you don't see lots and lots of non-Lyrandar airships. But you could find one; the existence of an airship does not mean that Lyrandar has to sanction the actions. Well, no, but you only need a Lesser Dragonmark to have wind's favor and that's quite a ways more powerful than a simple gust of wind. Even just wind's favor is a very powerful advantage against a Sail Age vessel. You are correct, and wind's favor is really the key to Lyrandar's business. My bad here. Ah, but I wasn't dismissing the prospect out of hand. I was saying that a pirate would need to be exceptionally strong in order to prey on Lyrandar ships and expect of get away with it. Is Prince Mika one of these exceptionally strong pirates? Absolutely. The Cloudreavers are one of the most infamous principalities, which is why they are mentioned in the ECS in the first place. As you've said, wind's favor alone would protect a Lyrandar vessel from most pirates. The fact that the Cloudreavers can prey on Lyrandar vessels says something about them. You've noted that Lyrandar has their ship's mages - the point is that the Lhazaars have these too, as indicated by the "Ship's Mage" feat included with the article. House Lyrandar has far, far MORE people who can control the winds - but that doesn't mean that you can't find weather mages elsewhere. Lyrandar can call itself the House of Storms because it has thousands of heirs, and hundreds of ships. Prince Mika may only have a handful of ships; she certainly couldn't go to war against Lyrandar. But she can prey on its smaller vessels, just as terrorists can attack a military superpower. Now, let's take a broader look at our differing views of House Lyrandar - because this extends to other houses, such as Jorasco and Ghallanda. You say that attacking a Lyrandar vessel would be like attacking a British ship of the line, not just any merchantman. Whereas in my view, Lyrandar encompasses both the British fleet AND the merchantmen. With Lyrandar ships, you basically have two tiers. At the core, you have the actual fleet of the house. These will be the largest, best-maintained ships, and they will be staffed almost entirely by members of the Lyrandar family (possibly with Deneith marines). If you are on a ship, you should feel fairly assured of your safety, and pirates will be more likely to avoid such a vessel. But beneath this, you have a host of smaller ships - and this fleet would be larger than any national power. The strength of Lyrandar *is* wind power, as you've said - the ability for a Lyrandar ship to sail against the wind, to get where it's going faster than any normal vessel. The vast majority of vessels in the Windwright's Guild have Lyrandar captains and may have a few heirs of the house among their crew, but they also have a wide variety of other sailors. Some of these ships are actually owned by their captains, who have full discretion over their activities; others are leased from the house. In either case, the captains coordinate their activities through the local house enclaves, receiving cargoes or running routes. But an independent captain can choose to charter his boat or sail his own routes, provided that he does not interfere with house operations in doing so (so if the house forbids traffic in a certain substance, blacklists a specific individual, invokes an embargo, he's expected to go along with it). He's expected to do what the house asks if a request is made. He pays a tithe to the house, in exchange for the many services it provides. But he is not completely bound into it. When you go to the docks and see a vessel flying the Lyrandar flag, you know what to expect - but if it's not a full ship of the line, you also know what not to expect. A normal ship is not 100% secure. It may not carry a detachment of marines or heavy armaments. But generally, it won't need them; as you've said, it can outrun any normal vessel, so what's the concern? Yes, a Cloudreaver ship might be able to take you down. A kraken could eat you. But hey, an airplane could crash. Piracy is always a concern, but on any Lyrandar vessel, it's a fairly small one. In the case of something like House Ghallanda, an innkeeper can be a member of the Hosteller's Guild and sanctioned by the house without actually being a member of the house; it's a matter of meeting the standards set by the house, so that customers will receive the service they expect to go with the house name. Likewise, note that the Dragonshard on House Phiarlan makes a distinction between those who directly serve the house and heirs who operate smaller, semi-independant operations. Overall, Lyrandar is the most efficient power on the seas. However, by the terms of the treaties, they are not supposed to possess a true armada. The argument can easily be made that armada or not, manueverability alone would grant their ships victory. And that aside, they HAVE been building more warships in recent years, on the belief that the treaty no longer applies. But they are not and have not presented themselves to the world as a military power - among other things because regardless of their preeminance on the seas, they still need some place to berth their ships. They make a fine profit through economic endeavors, and this is the strength they have relied on. Piracy is a small problem for them. Planes can crash; Lyrandar ships can be taken by pirates. But it's much more of a concern for non-Lyrandar vessels. Now, with that said, as a whole the Lhazaars are the NEXT most powerful force on the seas, if they choose to combine together. They have thousands of years of experience to draw on. They have magical heirlooms that have been handed down from generation to generation - not many, but they aren't trying to match the size of the Lyrandar fleet. Any Bloodsail vessel will have a ship's wizard, if not more than one. Others princes have druids who can call lightning from the sky. And then you have the Gray Tide... well more on that next article. Lyrandar is the preeminant power on the seas. It has the most ships, and any ship captained by an heir with the wind's favor will travel swiftly and be able to outmanuever any mundane ship. The Lhazaar fleets are smaller - but they are elite units. If Marks are found outside the Houses, what do they represent? Is this unique for the Mark of Storms? Foundlings and excoriates are a part of life, along with those who choose to leave their houses. You are correct to assume that the house will act to protect its monopoly, and that rogue heirs who present a serious threat to their profits may be dealt with one way or another. However, a few Lhazaar captains with the Mark of Storms don't really measure as a threat to Lyrandar's broad operations - especially since the house doesn't operate in the Principalities. Furthermore, while the houses have been more ruthless in the past - as shown by the War of the Mark - Galifar didn't approve of houses assassinating heirs. These days a foundling is encouraged to join the house, and if he proves a threat he well be dealt with - but he can exist independently if he is not threatening house profits. It's all up to him and what he does. Again, another point of Dragonmarked House concept in which it seems my presumptions were different from your vision. If Lyrandar had warships, I would venture to propose that they would only extend actual ship operation only insofar as their fleet can protect it.... It's back to the point that Lyrandar was and is *expected* to rely on the military protection of the kings of the Five Nations. Regardless of whether a Brelish warship could match a Lyrandar warship, these were the terms of Galifar. Again, a ship of the core Lyrandar fleet will be more than capable of protecting itself, and a Lyrandar merchant can turn the winds to try to flee. But in the past, Lyrandar's reputation has never been based on its military might. This returns to the political structure of the Guild. In many ways, Guild members from medieval times counted themselves members of their guild more than they were a member of their nations, and their guilds not only provided them with economic and professional protection, but political protection as well. It's a matter of position within the guild. If you're a captain, a shipwright, or similar person, you may be a member of the Lyrandar family or consider yourself a member of the house by proxy, and you may put that loyalty above all else. But you also have common deckhands and sailors. They can expect the guild to look out for them on a certain level, and they know they can find work through the guild. But they were still born as Brelanders, and if their guild actually declared war on Breland, they might balk. Even if it declared war on the Lhazaars, they might simply say "I signed up to work on a merchant vessel; no one said nothing about going to war." Guild membership may be a defining part of these people's lives, and for many it may be their entire lives. But for others it is a way to make a living, and not something that comes before loyalty to king and country. Of course, the guildmasters will notice such things, and such people shouldn't be expected to rise far. You also have to consider that the House guilds are less selective than many medieval guilds, because of their sheer size and the fact they are trying to hold monopolies on trades. Thus, you can't make entry into the guild as contingent on loyalty as you could if you were, basically, a small and elite secret society. You may have such a group at the higher levels of the guild; but at the lower levels you have the people who simply have the skills you need to run your business. Saying that most Guildsmen are loyal only to the gold... No, I admit that was an overstatement. Guild members will take pride in their association. But you still have the fact that a common sailor may back out if he's told he has to go to war. He may be loyal to the guild, but that doesn't mean he's willing to shed his blood for it. Some may be; the crews of that core fleet would be chosen for loyalty. But most of the lower ranking members of the guild are chosen for skill and competance. When you hire a crew from the Windwright's Guild, you know that they will be some of the best sailors available in the town. But that doesn't mean that they are fanatics who would lay down their lives for the house. As I thought, Lyrandar would be much closer to something like a worldwide monopoly combining every single overnight delivery and sea shipping service combined with the British naval forces and a nation-like unity and identity. The half-elves of House Lyrandar have that nation-like identity. If you're a dwarf sailor, you know you're never going to be fully accepted as a member of the house. You take pride in your rank in the guild, and it brands you as a skilled individual. But you still have ties to your homeland. Some people - especially high-ranking members of the guild - will have that loyalty. It's going to vary by the individual. But what's most important to the guild is that it has the monopoly on skilled sailors; it doesn't need those sailors to serve as soldiers as well. Apparently, Lyrandar is more or less a sitting duck as far as military power is concerned. The thing I'm wondering at here is that if any two-bit human pirate can prey regularly on Lyrandar vessels, what's to prevent everyone else preying on sea shipping wholesale? How do you draw this conclusion? Who's talking about two-bit human pirates? JJust because there are elite pirates who can prey on Lhazaar ships hardly makes them sitting ducks. I'll again use the terrorist/superpower analogy. You can be the biggest, baddest kid on the block and still fall victim to a sneaky, well-planned, highly-trained individual. Does this cripple your operations worldwide? Not at all. But you're not invulnerable either. And just because Lyrandar doesn't have a battlefleet, their power over wind alone makes them a force to be reckoned with, as you've repeatedly said - as does their sheer economic power. Most Lyrandar vessels can simply outrun "two-bit human pirates"; they don't need to be able to outfight them. Lyrandar controls the Windwrights Guild and the Mark of Storms. Almost by definition, its navy would be more powerful than anyone else's in the continent. And if their ships were armed and armored in the same many as the war fleets of the Five Nations, that would undoubtedly be true. But that's precisely what Galifar prevented. A Lyrandar ship could outrun or outmanuever any enemy (unless they have their own magical motive power); that doesn't mean that they can necessarily outfight a far more heavily armed ship. Again, that's a thing that may now change, as the individual nations may not have the power to enforce these edicts that united Galifar did. But that's the issue. Lyrandar wasn't trying to build an indestructible armada; its focus was on swift transportation. In the Age of Sail, wind power is sea power, and Lyrandar supposedly has this in spades. It doesn't really need a whole lot of ships to do this, either. A couple ships with independent power will decimate a whole armada of Sail Age vessels. You may be right. But I'll still say that if you have a yacht and a pistol, and I have a vessel with cannons and a thick hull, I'll give you a run for your money. I could never defeat you if you simply chose to leave or stay out of my range - but you're hardly going to sink me. seeing as no one is defending Lyrandar interests for close to a hundred years now, a necessary one. Not at all. The navy of Breland defends the coastline of Breland, and that includes all merchant vessels in Brelish waters - including Lyrandar ships. It's not the united navy of Galifar, but it's still a sovereign power laying claim to those waters - and Lyrandar's presentation of a military threat would still have been seen as a threat, and possibly resulted in denial of the use of Brelish harbors. Which they could counter with an embargo, and so on, and so on - the point is, there simply wasn't a need. Lyrandar vessels can still outrun any normal ship. The Brelish warships are guarding the waters. Why, if you will pardon the expression, rock the boat? What do they need warships for, if only a handful of elite pirates can give them trouble? In most cases, there's no need for a Lyrandar vessel to fight when it can run. The only real need for warships would be an actual attempt to take power from the rulers of the Five Nations - to challenge their warships. So far, that hasn't been planned. With that said, yes, I'm suggesting that Lyrandar has built a few warships, both as pirate hunters and secure vessels - but in small enough numbers that the nations don't see them as a threat. The power is there, but so far, there's been no need to exercise it. If they did, they become a target not only for pirates but for warships - and while they may be the ultimate power on the seas, they are NOT the ultimate power on land. Their enclaves could be destroyed. They could be denied safe harbor. The nations could turn to House Orien and place a greater reliance on overland transportation. All of which would be bad for business. So, in my view, they've maintained their emphasis on economic power, not military power. They can't be attacked by any two-bit human pirate - so they don't need warships to sink such vessels. Since the Houses are supposedly neutral, this would be, at best, a trivial matter, especially compared to Thrane's army parked outside your doorstep ready to march. It's necessary for Lyrandar to develop this power to its logical conclusion and I don't understand how any sane ruler would concern himself with this when he's got more pressing matters to attend to. Because, from Galifar on down, the rulers have ALWAYS been afraid of the power of the Dragonmarked Houses. They'd be fools not to be. Hence the forced destruction of the Creation Forges. The Treaty of Galifar was the first point of these; Galifar was prepared to go to war with the houses instead of allowing them to exist in his kingdom. That's something that's never been forgotten. Every king knows how powerful Lyrandar COULD be - just because you have an enemy on your doorstep doesn't mean you ignore the far, far greater threat that may lie on the horizon. Some of the house leaders are interested in pushing this and seeing how far it goes. Lyrandar certainly has more warships now than it did. But there's no reason to rush things or be so obvious about it; all things in time. |
| MavrickWeirdo05-06-05, 07:54 PM | Now, see Hellcow, this I have a problem with: Now, I don't have a problem with Houses not seeing eye-to-eye. In fact, that should happen just as often as not. The main problem I see here is the competing portion. So are they or are they not monopolies? Are they Merchant Houses or just Corporations with fancy names? If 2 monopolies ever got into a semi-direct competition with each other, the absolute last thing they would try to do is compete. That's because competition is bad for business. It's good for the consumer, yes, but then again, the consumer isn't really the focus on monopoly type setups. First, they would try to do away with one another, with vicious wars, both economic and military. Needless to say, economic would most likely be the war scenario here. If this is not possible, they would come to an agreement to price things jointly and generally do business amicably, if not altogether in a friendly manner. This is called a cartel and is the most likely scenario when two nonstate controlled monopolies tangle over a product. That means that unless they had some really personal issues on the line, Orien and Lyrandar, over the course of several hundred years, would most likely come to view joint business as the rule rather than the exception and they would most likely be some of the closer of the merchant houses rather than at each other's throats. Far from competing and risking ruin and loss, they would have worked out long and complex rules of engagement over who has precedence where and for what. Even if they come to an impasse, competition would probably be the furtherest thought from their minds. This is an exelent discription of the Lhazaar Princes. |
| Solarious05-06-05, 10:26 PM | Another factor when considering the power of the Dragonmarked Houses is the fact that there is a limited number of people with Dragonmarks, which is a natural limiter of the House's powers. Sure, there may be thousands of heirs, but the vast majority of them have only the Least mark of Storms (about 1 in 200). The ones with the Lesser mark outnumber the ones with the Least ten to one. Before I go any further, I'm referencing This Post (http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=4206637&postcount=49) from MarkB's excellent Ask Keith Baker FAQ, just in case you're wondering where I'm pulling the numbers from. Just keep scrolling down, you'll see it. Or do what I did, and search for the term Siberys. Numerically, only a third of these people will be able to use Wind's Favour. The third with the ability to use Sleet Storm will undoubtly be busy in the raincaller's guild... calling rain, and the last third who are able to use Wind Wall are more-or-less irrelevant to this discussion. People with the Greater Mark are even rarer, outnumbering those with the Lesser Mark ten to one again. Again, not all these people will be able to use Wind's Favour either. People with the Mark of Siberys can't do anything but invoke large scale destruction, can't use the Wheel of Wind and Water, and are limited to a handful of people at any one time in any case. I think we can ignore them. As for the Dragonmarked Heir PrC, not everyone has the potential to advance into it, neither do NPCs always have the luxury of choosing what ability they manifest. PCs ignore this, mostly because they break rules by being PCs in the first place. Don't forget Lyrander also has to have a captain capable of using Wind's Favour in order to pilot an airship, diluting the number of sea-going captains further who can use this potent ability. Oh, and a bunch are almost always at Stormhome, maintaining the paradise of the Lyrander seat of power. One last thing is that of all these people, only about one in ten probably have durable PC classes to augment their powers. As opposed to Lahzaar pirates, who have to have an above-average number of PC class members by default, as a consequence of their occupation. Yes, the Lyrander heirs can cause incredible havoc at long range with their Dragonmark abilities, but at least some of these can be mitigated using magic, and once you're up close, things can get very ugly very fast. Of course, some group like Mika's Cloudreavers can take on one of the pride of Lyrander en-masse, but it would be probably be expensive to both sides, must be worth something a great deal to Mika, probably has backing from one of the villianous cabals, and should be the focus of an adventure. |
| Radkres05-06-05, 10:44 PM | Think about it this way how do you gain advantage in a sail powered battle? In this magic world you have a few options. 1. Oars and sails give the ability to move in calmed seas and are more maneuverable than just sail. 2. Catapult Stone of Becalming (removes the wind within 400 ft radius of what ever it hits lasts for 10 minutes) Arms and Equipment guide page 49 3. Cloud Keel gives its vessel the ability to fly at a speed of 40 feet(clumsy) same page 4. Planar sails this would be harder to pull off but fade into and out of Ethereal would give you the jump on some one. Page 50 5. Veil of Obscurity basically a cloaking device page 51 6. Wind Favored Sails same page 7. Make your boat from Soarwood and double your speed. 8. Summon Air / Water elemental to help you maneuver or hinder theirs. |
| Solarious05-06-05, 10:56 PM | Think about it this way how do you gain advantage in a sail powered battle? In this magic world you have a few options. 1. Oars and sails give the ability to move in calmed seas and are more maneuverable than just sail. 2. Catapult Stone of Becalming (removes the wind within 400 ft radius of what ever it hits lasts for 10 minutes) Arms and Equipment guide page 49 3. Cloud Keel gives its vessel the ability to fly at a speed of 40 feet(clumsy) same page 4. Planar sails this would be harder to pull off but fade into and out of Ethereal would give you the jump on some one. Page 50 5. Veil of Obscurity basically a cloaking device page 51 6. Wind Favored Sails same page 7. Make your boat from Soarwood and double your speed. 8. Summon Air / Water elemental to help you maneuver or hinder theirs. Think of it this way: these items probably do not exist in Eberron. In a high-magic world like the Forgotten Realms, maybe. But this is the world of Eberron, which is wide-magic, not high. Besides, it's from the Arms and Equipment Guide, anything from there is suspect. The last part is a good point though: Planar Ally/Binding spells and Summon Monster is not entirely out of reach for Eberronian people. |
| Radkres05-06-05, 11:04 PM | Think of it this way: these items probably do not exist in Eberron. In a high-magic world like the Forgotten Realms, maybe. But this is the world of Eberron, which is wide-magic, not high. Besides, it's from the Arms and Equipment Guide, anything from there is suspect. The last part is a good point though: Planar Ally/Binding spells and Summon Monster is not entirely out of reach for Eberronian people. Strange that you feel that way when The core 3.5 books were printed in July 2003 and the Arms and Equipment guild was printed in March 2003. |
| Solarious05-06-05, 11:18 PM | Strange that you feel that way when The core 3.5 books were printed in July 2003 and the Arms and Equipment guild was printed in March 2003. Your point being... Because in all honesty, I don't see it. |
| Radkres05-06-05, 11:40 PM | Your point being... Because in all honesty, I don't see it. I guess my point is that the Core 3.5 books and Arms and Equipment Guide were made around the same time. You would think that it would be comparable with much of the same people working on both at the same time. Till they make Arms and Equipment Guide 3.5 this will have to do. If this does not fit in your vision of Eberron then don't use it. As is everything in this game it is up to each individual DM to decide what they will or will not use in their game. I am sorry if I upset you in some way. |
| Hellcow05-06-05, 11:53 PM | Numerically, only a third of these people will be able to use Wind's Favour. Actually, that's not a safe assumption. There's no rule stating that the dragonmark powers have equal distribution among the heirs of the house. It could be 45% WF, 45% Sleet Storm, 10% Wall of Wind. Or 75% WF, 20% Sleet Storm, 5% Wall of Wind. Personally, my inclination is to say that the more useful powers are also the most common powers - so more Jorascos have cure light wounds than lesser restoration. However, I certainly agree with the rest of this post. |
| Sarlax05-07-05, 12:34 PM | Another factor when considering the power of the Dragonmarked Houses is the fact that there is a limited number of people with Dragonmarks, which is a natural limiter of the House's powers. Sure, there may be thousands of heirs, but the vast majority of them have only the Least mark of Storms (about 1 in 200). The ones with the Lesser mark outnumber the ones with the Least ten to one. Hm, I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly. Are you arguing that of the blood members of House Lyrandar, only 1 in 200 have Dragonmarks? The post you reference here (url=http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=4206637&postcount=49) refers only to the Mark of Siberys. The ECS says on p.73, "Perhaps as many as one person in a hundred has a blood connection to one of the twelve houses. Of these thousands, however, no more than half actually manifest a dragonmark." It's not one in 200 family members. The text suggests that the marked make up .5% of the population of Khorvaire. This does mean, however, that you'd expect Sharn to have 1000 people with dragonmarks living there. The post you linked suggests only 1 person with the Mark of Siberys would be expected to live in Sharn. This does make a nice progression: 1 in 200 people have the Least Mark, 1 in 2,000 have the Lesser Mark, 1 in 20,000 have the Greater Mark, and 1 in 200,000 have the Siberys Mark (with small adjustments made for the fact that the more powerful individuals are drawn from the ranks of the Least-marked). Anyway, the question really is this: Is the Dragonmarked Heir class text accurate when it suggests that 1 in 200 people on the continent have marks? Khorvaire has about 16 million people, so that's 80,000 people who have the Least Mark or better. |
| Hellcow05-07-05, 01:29 PM | This does mean, however, that you'd expect Sharn to have 1000 people with dragonmarks living there. The post you linked suggests only 1 person with the Mark of Siberys would be expected to live in Sharn. This is corect. The figures James and I came up with when developing the Sharn sourcebook were: Least Marks: 956 Lesser Marks: 96 Greater Marks: 10 Siberys Mark: 1 Cannith has the strongest representation, including the Siberys Mark. Thuranni and Vadalis have fairly minor representation. Deneith has a reasonable number of heirs, but none with the Greater Mark - though, of course, a Sentinel Marshal with the mark could always pass through town. The thing about Sharn is that you can always have visitors or specialists called in to the enclaves. This is something we could have listed in the book, but there's also the "If you want an heir with this power in the city, then have one" factor; since it is Sharn, they can call people in if need be. |
| Grynn05-07-05, 02:22 PM | I don't remember anybody in the Sharn sourcebook being noted as having levels in Heir of Siberys. If I missed him/her, could you point out where? |
| Hellcow05-07-05, 05:09 PM | I don't remember anybody in the Sharn sourcebook being noted as having levels in Heir of Siberys. If I missed him/her, could you point out where? You didn't, because she's not someone people are likely to ever meet. Lassolyn d'Cannith (N female human commoner 6/expert 6/heir of Siberys 3) is a brilliant artist and craftswoman, but she is shy and retiring and prefers the quiet order of the workshop to the chaotic streets of Sharn. As she is a great asset to the house, this antisocial behavior is encouraged. Should she ever leave the enclave, she will be escorted by a squad of guards, both human and warforged. Few people outside of House Cannith even know that she exists, and that's how Cannith likes it. |
| PoeticJustice05-07-05, 06:43 PM | Should she ever leave the enclave, she will be escorted by a squad of guards, both human and warforged. Few people outside of House Cannith even know that she exists, and that's how Cannith likes it. That's a disgustingly good plot hook. Rescue missions, escape attempts, even seeing her walk down the street is a good encounter. Thanks, Keith! |
| Korhal_IV05-08-05, 01:49 AM | That's a disgustingly good plot hook. Rescue missions, escape attempts, even seeing her walk down the street is a good encounter. Thanks, Keith! The man can't open his mouth without a campaign slipping out of it. His mother must be so proud. :D Going back to the ol' Lyrandar-Cloudreaver argument, it strikes me that the cheapest way for Lyrandar to beat Mika is to fight fire with fire - if your ships are being hit randomly by sneaky, elite fighters, then you hire some elite, sneaky fighters to go after the guys causing you trouble. Think about it - pulling some ships of the line off duty will cause hundreds of thousands of galifars' worth of business losses just from their absence, let alone if one or more get sunk. The PCs, on the other hand, stupid dupes that they are, will drool at the chance to lock fangs with Prince Mika for a hundredth of that price. And if they die? Plenty more where they came from! :devil: Just as Lyrandar has to worry about sneak attacks from the Cloudreavers, the Cloudreavers have to worry about sneak attacks from bounty hunters! |
| Roxlimn05-10-05, 08:18 PM | Yow! More stuff from Hellcow!!!! Thanks, Keith, for being such a good sport. God knows this is one of the coolest reasons why I like Eberron so much. I'd say that we've taken quite enough of your time as it is, so I wouldn't overly mind if you bowed out. I'd be thrilled with any bone you might throw in the future on this thread, though, so please post as much as you like. :D I'd like to continue the discussion based on Keith's input. The way the Lhazaar Princes operate and their place in the world cannot be properly appreciated and put into perspective without a discussion of the most powerful sea power in Khorvaire, so please pardon the Lyrandar comments. It's not only because Lyrandar is such a cool House, it's something that bears directly on the Lhazaar Princes themselves. Airships in Battle: Yes. The dispel magic would indeed be a problem. Having said that, why would any Lyrandar captain consent to put his ship in such mortal danger? Obviously, the solution would be to never place the ship in any range of a dispel magic. Fireball and Longbow Arrows have exceptional range. No need to close at all. Also, I was under the impression that Lyrandar didn't make any Airships at all. I thought that Cannith and the Zil shipwrights did that. Non-Lyrandar Airships: Airships are a mighty powerful weapon, either militarily or economically. I would think that Lyrandar would put significant pressure on Cannith and the Zil shipwrights to sell only to them, and moreover, that they would exert effort to make sure that only Lyrandar has any Air power at all. Nations acquiring Airships would be a notable exception, of course, but they could make the same case as Cannith does for Skyforges and Orien does for Lightning Coaches. Indeed, if Ariships existed in non-Lyrandar hands, it opens other Houses to similar straits. In such a scenario, House unity in protecting a monopoly would be to all the Houses' interests and would likely result in a more or less united front - something no nation in Galifar can stand for very long. So how frequently do you come across a non-Lyrandar Airship? I'd say quite infrequently at the most. House Structure: I think the basic divide exists here. Now, let's take a broader look at our differing views of House Lyrandar - because this extends to other houses, such as Jorasco and Ghallanda. You say that attacking a Lyrandar vessel would be like attacking a British ship of the line, not just any merchantman. Whereas in my view, Lyrandar encompasses both the British fleet AND the merchantmen... ...But beneath this, you have a host of smaller ships - and this fleet would be larger than any national power. The strength of Lyrandar *is* wind power, as you've said - the ability for a Lyrandar ship to sail against the wind, to get where it's going faster than any normal vessel. The vast majority of vessels in the Windwright's Guild have Lyrandar captains and may have a few heirs of the house among their crew, but they also have a wide variety of other sailors. Now there is the divide. Just as I don't consider a Ghallanda sanctioned inn to be precisely a Ghallanda establishment, nor would I consider a Lyrandar sanctioned ship to be precisely a Lyrandar ship. Those are two different things, and I rather think that the Houses would be astute enough to mark a distinction and keep to it. You indicate that "the vast majority" of vessels in the Windwrights Guild would have Lyrandar captains and may have a few heirs counted among their crew. I thought rather differently. The assumption is that Pirates exist. So. For pirates to exist, they must prey on something. So much is established. However, Lyrandar suffer such pirates to exist. Why? Option 1: Lyrandar is powerless to stop them. Pirates are actually the most powerful force on the water, not Lyrandar. Unacceptable. Option 2: Lyrandar actually funds some of these privateers. They keep the Guildsmen in line by funding privateers who sink the ships of captains who refuse to follow Guild rules and regulations. Corollary A: Not all captains are Lyrandar, most are just Lyrandar sanctioned. By extension, many ships are not actually Lyrandar ships, just Windwright sanctioned ships. Corollary B: Pirates would typically prey on these ships, or lesser ships. Ships that fly an actual Lyrandar flag would be surpassingly powerful, and not something to mess with lightly, even for powerful pirates. Corollary C: Relying on the power of their prestige, Lyrandar can safely send a sizeable flotilla of ships bearing the Lyrandar flag. No one can know whether a ship is actually a real merchantman or a cleverly disguised Lyrandar privateer, thus, most pirates would tend to shy away from ships flying a Lyrandar flag. Enough non-Lyrandar shipping exists to support a healthy amount of piracy anyway. Option 3: Lyrandar isn't an actual monopoly. They just like to think they are. ??? So I like to think that there are a lot more of these types of captains: But an independent captain can choose to charter his boat or sail his own routes, provided that he does not interfere with house operations in doing so (so if the house forbids traffic in a certain substance, blacklists a specific individual, invokes an embargo, he's expected to go along with it). He's expected to do what the house asks if a request is made. He pays a tithe to the house, in exchange for the many services it provides. just as there are a healthy amount of inns that aren't actually run by Ghallanda personnel. Thus, when I say "Lyrandar ship," I'm actually referring to a ship manned primarily by actual Lyrandar House members, and Lyrandar is expected to protect their members just like any other House would. Moreover, while Lyrandar tithes all ships that come into harbor, the only ships allowed to run a Merchant flag (or some other indication of Lyrandar approval) are those specifically examined and approved by Lyrandar reps for seaworthiness and general excellence. The Argument for Marines: This is part of the reason why I think Lyrandar needs to have a military arm. In fact, practically all the Houses do. It's what Houses are, merchant houses, I mean. The de facto assumption made when saying that Dragonmarked Houses are non-military is that they can expect the Five Nations to defend their interests without necessarily looking after their own. Sure, Breland is expected to defend Lyrandar ships, but how would Brelanders feel about that when a besieged Cyran port is sustained by Lyrandar ships? At the very least, Lyrandar can expect some amout of neglect in Brelish waters, if not outright spontaneous aggression by irate Brelander shipmen. It's war, after all, and these things happen. Moreover, what if a Brelish interest runs counter to a Lyrandar interest? Between protecting their waters from hostile Cyran vessels and protecting a Lyrandar ship from piracy, I think the answer is at least in question against Lyrandar. There are subtler nuances to that as well. While Lyrandar can embargo a nation, such an act would run counter to the agreement of neutrality and would endanger all of the Houses, not just Lyrandar. Lyrandar, therefore, can no more embargo any single nation than a Deneith can obviously favor any side in a war, even if that nation were "neglecting" their defensive duties as far as the Houses are concerned. And the intrigues! Any of a number of simple intrigues would bring any House to its knees given the amount of influence military power holds over you, if you have significant interests in the area in question. There's a reason merchants paid tithes (taxes) to kings, and not the other way around. There's more. In any area not bound by the Five Nations - Q'barra, sahuagin, and more, your economic influence is only as good as your military influence is. No sane franschiser invests in a McDonald's in North Korea. The government would run his business to the ground, and that's if they're being nice. No. If the sahuagin would benefit more from taking your merchantmen than from taking your bribes, then you can't stop them from taking your ships. If you pay them more than what your ships are worth, then you're running ships at a significant loss, no? The only real, and really, the only reasonable solution to all this is that Lyrandar has been forced, by virtue of survival in an increasingly hostile world, to create a military arm to defend its own interests at sea. Even if Lyrandar prefers to solve things with negotiation and money, those forces only matter if they can back their money with a velvet-covered iron fist. The assurance Lyrandar can give to the Five Nations is a powerful one - minimal land forces and no land of their own. No other House can afford to be so cavalier. Certainly not Kundarak - they need to protect their banks. Likewise, almost every other House needs to maintain significant land forces because their interests are land based. Since Lyrandar's interests are almost entirely at sea, they can afford to placate the Five Nations by leaving themselves completely dependent on land - and thus be considerably more powerful at sea without unduly alarming anyone. But they are not and have not presented themselves to the world as a military power - among other things because regardless of their preeminance on the seas, they still need some place to berth their ships. They would be fools to do so. Even the Mishima Zaibatsu downplays their considerable military arm. I'd say that Lyrandar would only develop as much military might as they need to protect their interests. They're not primarily a political entity - there's no reason for them to bluster. But in the past, Lyrandar's reputation has never been based on its military might. And that need not change. Lyrandar can be the most powerful military force at sea without proclaiming such an ability to the highest heavens. The Treaty of Galifar was the first point of these; Galifar was prepared to go to war with the houses instead of allowing them to exist in his kingdom. That's something that's never been forgotten. Every king knows how powerful Lyrandar COULD be - just because you have an enemy on your doorstep doesn't mean you ignore the far, far greater threat that may lie on the horizon. And likely, Lyrandar and the other Houses would not forget, either. Lyrandar should probably keep any sign of its military power under strict wraps, and downplay any event showcasing their might at sea. They might even go to the extent of disguising the majority of their warships as merchantmen. With everyone so edgy about the potential political implications of Dragonmarks, Lyrandar would be a fool to advertise its power. I suspect that Vadalis keeps their huge potential for military power under wraps as well. On Guilds: It really depends on the population relationships. I was thinking that enough people consider Lyrandar their "nationality" to constitute a sizeable nation, counted throughout the continent, and at sea. Even so, not every person assisted and tithed by the Guilds were Guildsmen, even in medieval Guilds. On sitting ducks: How do you draw this conclusion? Who's talking about two-bit human pirates? Just because there are elite pirates who can prey on Lhazaar ships hardly makes them sitting ducks. I'll again use the terrorist/superpower analogy. You can be the biggest, baddest kid on the block and still fall victim to a sneaky, well-planned, highly-trained individual. Does this cripple your operations worldwide? Not at all. But you're not invulnerable either. Yes. Just as you say. Elite pirates can prey on Windwright shipping, and even on the rare Lyrandar ship, but I don't believe that such should be a regular occurence. If Prince Mika makes a habit of killing Lyrandar heirs whenever she thinks she can get away with it, the House is liable to take notice and take action. Given Lyrandar's capabilities (even from Hellcow's estimation), Prince Mika wouldn't stand a chance. She probably might not even survive long enough to invoke the protection traditional of Lhazaar Pirates. And just because Lyrandar doesn't have a battlefleet, their power over wind alone makes them a force to be reckoned with, as you've repeatedly said - as does their sheer economic power. Most Lyrandar vessels can simply outrun "two-bit human pirates"; they don't need to be able to outfight them. I think you overestimate the strategic power of wind's favor. As a tactical capability, and a strategic card in a game of war, it's unparalleled. No spell of comparable level even comes close. An armada with wind's favor would be the terror of the Khorvairian seas. As a strategic power, it's much less powerful. Submarines typically traveled at speeds not much more than half the speed of the ships they were designed to sink, and sometimes even attacked above-water prior to flock tactics. They still got their sheep. When you're ambushing a ship through a forced passage, speed doesn't matter that much. When you're battling warships on the open sea, wind's favor is da bomb. And then, of course, there's the matter of some Lhazzar Pirates sporting the Mark of Storms. With all that on the table, it's not looking good for Lyrandar unless they can defend their prestige in some independent manner. You may be right. But I'll still say that if you have a yacht and a pistol, and I have a vessel with cannons and a thick hull, I'll give you a run for your money. I could never defeat you if you simply chose to leave or stay out of my range - but you're hardly going to sink me. No need. I'll just gather a posse of similar yachts and board your vessels one by one. Given even 5 vessels to concentrate firepower, it almost doesn't matter whether long range firepower is feasible, or even if the enemy is crack. The sheer numbers game favors those who can concentrate firepower best. Having said that, the main difference between a Galleon and a Ship of the Line is mostly speed and cannon power. A Galleon on the defensive loaded with guns is a fearsome defender. Next post: How does this all relate to Lhazaar Princes? |
| Hellcow05-10-05, 09:23 PM | I'd say that we've taken quite enough of your time as it is, so I wouldn't overly mind if you bowed out. I'm afraid I must, at this point - what little time I have, I need to devote to the Ask Keith thread. Have fun! |
| Hellcow05-10-05, 10:52 PM | OK, I lied. I really shouldn't say any more AFTER this, but hey, it's an interesting discussion. I'll note that I answered this as I was reading it, and as a result it seems like we're disagreeing at the beginning and virtually in complete agreement at the end – so it goes. Hopefully the discussion is interesting in its own right – it certainly is to me. Also, I was under the impression that Lyrandar didn't make any Airships at all. I thought that Cannith and the Zil shipwrights did that. With Lyrandar gold, yes. But Lyrandar heirs are involved; you need to have the Mark of Storms to make a wheel of wind and water. So how frequently do you come across a non-Lyrandar Airship? I'd say quite infrequently at the most. Agreed. But we were talking about the potential of a military vessel in a time of war. Bringing us back to the fact that by the Treaty of Galifar, Lyrandar shouldn't be making aeriel warships, and given their obvious power of even an unarmed aerial vessel it's obviously something for nations to be concerned about. But the nations themselves are not constrained by the treaty. Cannith might choose not to make any vessels at all as a show of solidarity, or at least to only make a few – but the issue is, would an aerial warship automatically be a Lyrandar vessel? By the treaty of Galifar – and the ECS, which says that Lyrandar did not produce warships, the answer would be no. And this could go a long ways towards explaining why they are rare. Option 1: Lyrandar is powerless to stop them. Pirates are actually the most powerful force on the water, not Lyrandar. I think this is an overly simplistic view, in my opinion. For one thing, kill one pirate, another takes his place. There are criminals in our world. Are the criminals a greater power than the police force? No. And yet they continue to exist. There are nations known to harbor terrorists. Individually, the terrorists are no match for the nations they prey upon. But do they continue to exist? Yes. And that's just dealing with mundane pirates. Now, let's look at the Cloudreavers. Let's get down to brass tacks. The Cloudreavers use magic items that allow their ships to match the speed and maneuverability of Lyrandar vessels. They have druids that can match weather control with weather control. And they have picked their soldiers for bloodthirstiness. And, of course, they don't follow standard shipping lanes; they choose where to strike. Does this make them the most powerful force on the water? No. There just aren't ENOUGH of them. They couldn't fight the entire Brelish navy. They couldn't fight the entire LYRANDAR navy. But they aren't trying to, and they won't sit still long enough for another nation to bring its full forces to bear: we're back to the example of modern terrorists. You could lay siege to Port Krez, but now you're invading a sovereign nation. If Lyrandar does this on its own, it's doing just what the Treaty of Galifar was designed to prevent, and this will raise the concerns of the Five Nations in addition to the Lhazaar Princes. If Breland does it, it's still an act of war, and while you may feel the other Princes would sit back and take no action, I don't – on that point we'll just have to agree to disagree. Lyrandar could undertake such a war. But why? It's going to be a huge financial expense. The Lhazaar ships, while few in number, are as noted prepared with magic of their own. It's going to frighten the Five Nations. And while a few Lyrandar ships are occasionally taken down by pirates, we're not talking about immense numbers here; the pirates obviously devote most of their efforts to easier prey, if any is to be had. Finally, piracy is a tradition in the Principalities; killing Prince Mika won't stop a new prince from taking her place. Corollary B: Pirates would typically prey on these ships, or lesser ships. Ships that fly an actual Lyrandar flag would be surpassingly powerful, and not something to mess with lightly, even for powerful pirates. Agreed – though the Cloudreavers are exceptionally powerful pirates. So I like to think that there are a lot more of these types of captains… just as there are a healthy amount of inns that aren't actually run by Ghallanda personnel. Agreed. Thus, when I say "Lyrandar ship," I'm actually referring to a ship manned primarily by actual Lyrandar House members, and Lyrandar is expected to protect their members just like any other House would… the only ships allowed to run a Merchant flag (or some other indication of Lyrandar approval) are those specifically examined and approved by Lyrandar reps for seaworthiness and general excellence. Indeed. That's my core fleet/non-core fleet. The idea is that you would expect a secondary ship flying a Lyrandar flag to be the best service you could get beyond a core Lyrandar ship – and should pirates prey on Lyrandar vessels, it would be these secondary vessels. This is part of the reason why I think Lyrandar needs to have a military arm. In fact, practically all the Houses do… Moreover, what if a Brelish interest runs counter to a Lyrandar interest? Certainly. They'd all like them. Every house needs a private army. Yet that's precisely what Galifar I forbid, and what the Kings of Galifar have watched for since day one. It's what many of the houses are now considering, as shown in Death at Whitehearth and mentioned on page 232 of the ECS. And the intrigues! Any of a number of simple intrigues would bring any House to its knees given the amount of influence military power holds over you, if you have significant interests in the area in question. Which, again, is why Galifar always sought to maintain this power. It's not a matter of what makes sense for the HOUSES – it's clear that this relationship is detrimental to them, and it's something they are seeking to change. It's just that prior to the Last War, Galifar has had the upper hand and made sure to maintain it. You may be underestimating the nobility's fear of the power of the houses. If the sahuagin would benefit more from taking your merchantmen than from taking your bribes, then you can't stop them from taking your ships. If you pay them more than what your ships are worth, then you're running ships at a significant loss, no? Depends on your diplomats and what you have to offer. The most critical issue is that the goods in your vessels could be completely worthless to the sahuagin, but you may be able to offer something of far greater value that is far less useful to you – beads for Manhattan, if you will. Likewise, you may be able to take advantage of existing sahuagin politics; if the resources you have to offer are of value, the sahuagin may have much to gain from the alliance, and thus act to protect your ships from other sahuagin. I'm not arguing that military power has no place in the world – just that non-military solutions call for imagination. The only real, and really, the only reasonable solution to all this is that Lyrandar has been forced, by virtue of survival in an increasingly hostile world, to create a military arm to defend its own interests at sea. At which point it now has to defend its interests from the navy of Galifar, who among other things own the harbors themselves. Even if Lyrandar prefers to solve things with negotiation and money, those forces only matter if they can back their money with a velvet-covered iron fist. Back to the sahuagin – if you don't transport what they want over the water, they can never get it unless they trade with you. That is a form of final power that doesn't require military force. Having said all this, I do expect that Lyrandar has its marines and armed vessels, along with its weather mages – and that it has been increasing these forces over the last century. I do believe that the core fleet is a force to be feared, and that if you are on one of these galleons you should consider yourself completely safe from piracy. But I still maintain that in numbers alone, it is not a match for the navy of one of the Five Nations – or that if it is, this is a fact that Lyrandar is going to great lengths to conceal. The assurance Lyrandar can give to the Five Nations is a powerful one - minimal land forces and no land of their own… and thus be considerably more powerful at sea without unduly alarming anyone. Well, teach me to respond as I read instead of reading straight through first. My point is that they may be building this power without alarming anyone – but it is not a power the nations want them to have. Of course, monitoring and enforcement were far easier when there was a united kingdom; the Five Nations cannot expect to maintain the same level of control as Galifar, which is why I would say that the houses are quickly becoming the dominant powers of the world. Even the Mishima Zaibatsu downplays their considerable military arm. I'd say that Lyrandar would only develop as much military might as they need to protect their interests. They're not primarily a political entity - there's no reason for them to bluster. Hmm, well in spite of everything I've said before, this seems to fit my view perfectly. I'm happy to say that they've subtly developed a fleet to defend their interests, that of necessity it's power has grown over the course of the war, and that the Five Nations don't realize the power they possess – but launching an actually assault on Krag would draw attention to that. Yes. Just as you say. Elite pirates can prey on Windwright shipping, and even on the rare Lyrandar ship, but I don't believe that such should be a regular occurence. Absolutely! My point is that it happens; that doesn't mean that it happens regularly. People are willing to pay extra for Lyrandar transport because it is safer than other forms of shipping. Submarines typically traveled at speeds not much more than half the speed of the ships they were designed to sink, and sometimes even attacked above-water prior to flock tactics. They still got their sheep. Sure, but it also helps when you are trying to sink a vessel and have torpedoes, as opposed to close with it and board it. Yes, location can make a huge difference, but that also means those unsafe regions will be the ones most likely to merit the core vessels. And then, of course, there's the matter of some Lhazzar Pirates sporting the Mark of Storms. With all that on the table, it's not looking good for Lyrandar unless they can defend their prestige in some independent manner. Well, there is one other option: Stay out of the Lhazaar Principalities, which they largely do. If you can't secure the shipping lanes or don't care to take the expense, leave it to independents: they can't secure it either, but your reputation remains intact. Plane routes are based on economic factors; presumably Lyrandar shipping lanes are as well. The more powerful Lhazaar pirates may use magical means to head farther out and try to prey on the richer traffic; but if you don't have a ship in the water, it can't fall victim to pirates, and a ship in the English Channel is obviously safer than one in the Spanish Main. No need. I'll just gather a posse of similar yachts and board your vessels one by one. Given even 5 vessels to concentrate firepower, it almost doesn't matter whether long range firepower is feasible, or even if the enemy is crack. The sheer numbers game favors those who can concentrate firepower best. Certainly. And yet, if you are overwhelming my crack troops through sheer weight of numbers as opposed to matching my armament and skill, you can certainly expect significant losses. My point is simply that unless Lyrandar has a lot to gain, it's simply to avoid the conflict than to make such a sacrifice. And going back to the Lyrandar-Cloudreaver conflict, the issue is finding my one ship with your five – the terrorist vs. army issue again. You could come after Krag, but most of the people in Krag are civilians – you're attacking a nation because it supports piracy as opposed to finding the pirates themselves, and this is what the other princes will take a stand against. If you can find and defeat the Cloudreavers on the open sea, a Bloodsail captain would shake your hand. But if you attack the islands, you're striking against them all. |
| Roxlimn05-11-05, 02:14 AM | Hellcow: :bow: I'd like to thank you for your continued interest, and again, I expect no obligation to continue to participate. I wouldn't want to impose, and you have other concerns, of course (like the second part of the article ;) :D). It is said that in diversity, there can be unity, and I wouldn't want to actually impose my views on Eberron on everyone. In fact, I'm right glad enough that this discussion brings the subtle qualities of Khorvairain sea power balance into light, just as I was glad enough that the "Reconstructing" thread may have induced some ideas to get brought to light in the eventual Zil Dragonshard. Thanks, Keith. More power and more Dragonshards! There are some things that concern me, though: With Lyrandar gold, yes. But Lyrandar heirs are involved; you need to have the Mark of Storms to make a wheel of wind and water. :OMG: You're absolutely right! In that case, I'm surprised that Lyrandar would sell any wheel of wind and water to anyone at all. It's like Cannith selling off Skyforges! I can see where Lyrandar might rent out a Wheel for princely sums, but sell? They're not a product based house. They don't sell things. They sell transport. Why make an exception for the Wheel, especially where it jeopardizes their monopoly? They couldn't fight the entire LYRANDAR navy. But they aren't trying to, and they won't sit still long enough for another nation to bring its full forces to bear: we're back to the example of modern terrorists. You could lay siege to Port Krez, but now you're invading a sovereign nation. If Lyrandar does this on its own, it's doing just what the Treaty of Galifar was designed to prevent, and this will raise the concerns of the Five Nations in addition to the Lhazaar Princes. If Breland does it, it's still an act of war, and while you may feel the other Princes would sit back and take no action, I don't – on that point we'll just have to agree to disagree. Well, yes and no. Lyrandar does not need to invade Port Krez. They just need to blockade it long enough for Mika to be forced to return, and then then attack. Moreover, Lyrandar can't invade a sovereign nation because it simply doesn't have enough land troops, even if it's an island nation. Finally, Lyrandar has no interest in invading the Principalities, so if it ever made a point of invading one port as a matter of protecting its prestige, it would probably make sure that it was a "joint" venture with, say, Prince Ryger, just so there would be no misunderstanding. Prince Ryger would, of course, not be prevalied upon to actually supply ships and men. His participation in the "joint" venture would be strictly to proclaim to all and sundry that the Lyrandar action is not an invasion. The more pressing problem would be for Lyrandar to try to hide such a massive action from observers. If Lyrandar can take a port town all by itself, how powerful must it be? I'm somewhat familiar with the operations of South China gunrunners and modern pirates. Don't ask me how. They don't make a point of angering strong nationalities. In fact, they make a point of attacking only corporations and other such nonmilitary entities. If a group were to make an international enemy of a Sea Power (which happens on occasion), there would be hell to pay, and the group would go under in a matter of months. I'm saying here that while I think Prince Mika is a powerful pirate, I think she's too canny to allow herself to attack an actual Lyrandar core fleet vessel. There's no commensurate profit to it and it almost certainly will lead to the eventual demise of the Cloudreavers. Lyrandar could undertake such a war. But why? It's going to be a huge financial expense. The Lhazaar ships, while few in number, are as noted prepared with magic of their own. It's going to frighten the Five Nations. And while a few Lyrandar ships are occasionally taken down by pirates, we're not talking about immense numbers here; the pirates obviously devote most of their efforts to easier prey, if any is to be had. Finally, piracy is a tradition in the Principalities; killing Prince Mika won't stop a new prince from taking her place. Why? Prestige, that's why. Lyrandar has a reputation as being the most powerful force on the seas, economically speaking, anyway. Losing a Dragonmarked member to pirates would be both an insult and a challenge. If Lyrandar were to take that lying down, it would a like a declaration of open season on House members, both to landbound and sea-going enemies. It can't be allowed to pass unchallenged. While a second-tier Lyrandar-approved vessel can be taken by pirates without that much repercussion from Lyrandar, too much predation can make the cost of hunting them down to the last dog less expensive than the cost of sustaining the losses, and that's always a bad position to be in as a pirate. More ominously, the cost of sustaining pirate attacks can eventually make the route unprofitable, and that's more dangerous to the pirates than mere Lyrandar ire. Attacking and killing an Heir with a Lesser Dragonmark is a whole 'nother thing altogether. Even if you manage to overhaul and subdue a Lyrandar Ship of the Line, killing the Heir would be most unwise. Like other Houses across Khorvaire, Lyrandar would spare no expense, if only for the sake of vengeance. Killing Prince Mika wouldn't stop another Prince from taking her place, but hopefully, this Prince would prove wiser and stay well away from the Heirs. Indeed. That's my core fleet/non-core fleet. The idea is that you would expect a secondary ship flying a Lyrandar flag to be the best service you could get beyond a core Lyrandar ship – and should pirates prey on Lyrandar vessels, it would be these secondary vessels. 1. I don't expect Lyrandar to squander its prestige needlessly on Guild vessels as opposed to House vessels. House vessels might carry the Storm flag with the House emblem whereas Guild vessels might fly the Windwrights flag with some other design on it. 2. I wouldn't call them Lyrandar ships anymore than I would call Ellfate's Eatery a Ghallanda inn. It's a Hosteler-approved resto, probably, but Ghallanda tavern it is not. Similarly, a Windwrights ship is not a Lyrandar ship. Which, again, is why Galifar always sought to maintain this power. It's not a matter of what makes sense for the HOUSES – it's clear that this relationship is detrimental to them, and it's something they are seeking to change. It's just that prior to the Last War, Galifar has had the upper hand and made sure to maintain it. You may be underestimating the nobility's fear of the power of the houses. Maybe. Perhaps I'm just overestimating their ambition. You see, as soon as Galifar splinters into the Five Nations, every House Head would quickly realize the perilous situation they're in - no one is around to protect their interests any more. Everyone is too busy fighting everybody else. It's like the Sengoku Jidai period in Japan or the Three Kingdoms period in China. The most common solution is to back or ally yourself with one of the factions and let your fortunes rise and fall with him. However, the specialized nature of magical support throughout Khorvaire and the nature of the Houses made it sensible for all the Nations to declare them Neutral and forbid any one Nation or House to ally themselves with one another. So now you have armies and navies that purportedly protect House interests in general, but are really more interested in advancing political ambitions. Your holdings, and especially Lyrandar holdings at sea, being the most peripheral of the Houses in terms of area, become subject to external threats. An immediate scaling up of House military is necessary to ensure survival, and since they all survived, we can presume that a healthy amount of military build-up was allowed, even though the letter of the Treaty expressly forbade it. As long as no single House had more power than any other (and House Cannith, IMO, came close to exceeding everyone else's power enough to make it a target), the kings would be content to watch. However, the moment one House became politically very powerful... BAM! Gone like the Knights Templar. At which point it now has to defend its interests from the navy of Galifar, who among other things own the harbors themselves. If it had the navy of Galifar to watch over it, Lyrandar would not have needed that much of a military arm. But I still maintain that in numbers alone, it is not a match for the navy of one of the Five Nations – or that if it is, this is a fact that Lyrandar is going to great lengths to conceal. I would go with "goes to great lengths to conceal," Hellcow. Without Galifar to protect its interests, Lyrandar has its work cut out for it. It's got every single mile of coastline across Khorvaire to protect! No single navy of the Five Nations is sufficiently powerful to do this, IMO. But Lyrandar can - it must, in order to have survived. Even so, I don't subscribe to the idea that Lyrandar is blanketing the continent's shores with military coverage - that would be insanely powerful. Instead, they maintain a fleet of warships that protect the prestige of House ships (not necessarily Windwright ships). A Windwright ship can expect to be held under the protectorate of a House ship in sight, but the House won't exact revenge for just any Windwright ship that gets taken. Even so, the power to impress virtual immunity from attack would likely be a joint effect - it's a House so it'll take every advantage it can get. Likely, since the House has such close ties with Aundair, there would be less House warships in Aundair territory at any one time (though it could very easily be the reverse for many reasons). In any case, Lyrandar would likely use whatever nation-based resources it can to bolster its military resources. If it can send Brelish warships to ambush Mika (assuming Lyrandar is interested in hunting her down), it probably would do so in preference to sending its own warships. Nevertheless, in terms of numbers, in order to bolster nation-based military even by 15% in each of the Five Nations on average, and by 70-100% in Lyrandar interest areas that don't boast Five Nations control, Lyrandar would need a navy 50% again as numerous as any single Five Nations country, and commensurately much more powerful because of their monopoly on weather and sea magic on the main continent. Of course, this is no more than about 20% at most of the navy Galifar could send, if the Five Nations had been united. Sure, but it also helps when you are trying to sink a vessel and have torpedoes, as opposed to close with it and board it. Yes, location can make a huge difference, but that also means those unsafe regions will be the ones most likely to merit the core vessels. Khorvairian ships have things better than torpedoes! They have Fireball! One shot from a torpedo can sink a vessel, but it wasn't too likely. A single shot from a fireball will ignite every single exposed rigging and likely burn all the sails to a crisp, not to mention the superstructure. Even if the ship somehow manages to miraculously survive the first shot, it'll be almost completely dead on the water. Warp Wood can sink a vessel outright, or distort the main mast completely into uselessness. Even just an obscuring mist can render your speed dangerous to yourself. Moreover, I suspect that when the region is dangerous, Lyrandar will opt not to send any ships at all. Why endanger your reputation needlessly, right? It would probably send Windwright vessels almost exclusively. Expressly important cargo would merit a House Ship, but one that was fortified beyond all imagining, possibly as the Flagship of a warfleet. Yes, the cargo would probably need to justify an fleet for Lyrandar to bet its reputation on transporting it across a known dangerous location. Plane routes are based on economic factors; presumably Lyrandar shipping lanes are as well. The more powerful Lhazaar pirates may use magical means to head farther out and try to prey on the richer traffic; but if you don't have a ship in the water, it can't fall victim to pirates, and a ship in the English Channel is obviously safer than one in the Spanish Main. You must understand that piracy is based on economic factors as well, and a rather delicate balance of economic factors at that. In the Carribean, piracy evolved because of the Galleon trade and the rivalry between the English and the Spanish along the Spice and Gold route. In the South China Sea, piracy has been a way of life for the Sulu sultans and the Sri Visayan raiders for as long as anyone can remember. I would also note that desert raiders also tended to prey on the caravans plying the Silk Road, which was why those caravans sported heavy guard. You need an extremely profitable and high-stakes route for pirates to prey on, and this route must be profitable despite piratical pressure in order for it to remain open. Part of the reason the privateers eventually died out was the recall of the letters of marque by the Queen of England, but that really won't stop pirates from preying on ships. It would only really stop the Elizabethan Sea Dogs. They were notable seamen, but they weren't all there is to it. The major factor there is that Spain stopped the Galleon trade, opting to send its riches through an alternative route. The shipping lanes between the Philippines, Malaysia, and mainland Thailand has always been a strategic and profitable one. Chinese traders from as far back as the Qin Emperor have plied their junks throughout these waters to trade with Malay islanders and kingdoms. Also, the sea route through the islands avoided the incessant wars among the mainland kingdoms to supply ancient Siam with the trade it conducted with China. The Islands were also rich with spice, heavenly fruit, and unique produce, valuable luxury items in all the kingdoms of East and Southeast Asia. It is said that the ancient salt of the Pangasinenses were a gift of the gods and the finest in the world. Pirates not only could hide out amongst the many islands of the Celebes and the South China Sea, but the ever-changing boundaries of rival kingdoms meant that they could flee from a pursuing power essentially forever. The rich trade in the routes allowed pirates to survive in grand style, sometimes styling themselves kings and sultans in their own right, claiming booty as way of "taxation" for ships passing through "their waters." Of course, they only survived for as long as their depradations were cheaper than the expense of sending an Imperial Navy to chastise their ships all the way from the Celebes Sea to the Americas. In a way, the Chinese traders took the losses in stride and counted them as simply part of the cost of doing business, but when the Pirate Kings killed too many seamen or were especially greedy, the Imperial Navy flexed its muscles and made known the Emperor's displeasure. The English Channel itself is only safer than the Spanish Main because for a very long time, nothing crossed it that was of any value. When the formidable Spanish Armada was the foremost navy in the world, the Spanish Main was one of the safest places a ship could be. Indeed, the absolute safest place a ship can possibly be would be to be moored in the Dead Sea, because it wouldn't contain anything of value, and in itself, would be almost absolutely valueless. Which brings me to another difficulty: Khorvaire is a continent with no trade nor colonies in other continents. Most of the routes can be plotted and coursed over land. Anything that can be plotted with a sea course is almost always farther and would take much longer, to say nothing of sea-bound dangers, both natural and otherwise. What in the blue blazes is Lyrandar and the Windwrights Guild carrying? Why are the Lhazaar Pirates based leagues away northeast of anything that can be called significant? What the heck ship route are they preying on? Certainly. And yet, if you are overwhelming my crack troops through sheer weight of numbers as opposed to matching my armament and skill, you can certainly expect significant losses. Not really. You underestimate concentration of firepower. In the ancient Aegean sea, the Persian navy was the most powerful in terms of number, and they had the most experienced seamen. The Greek navy was able to defend itself by attacking the Persians through a chokepoint, essentially pitting one Persian ship at a time against the whole Greek fleet, puny as it was. Independent power in the Age of Sail does essentially the same thing. A small fleet with independent power can easily crush a fleet many times its size by only ever engaging one ship at a time. It's like a plane tailing another plane. It doesn't matter how strong your plane is - its guns are only facing forward - in this analogy, windward. As long as the small plane can stay on your tail, you'll eventually lose. And going back to the Lyrandar-Cloudreaver conflict, the issue is finding my one ship with your five – the terrorist vs. army issue again. You could come after Krag, but most of the people in Krag are civilians – you're attacking a nation because it supports piracy as opposed to finding the pirates themselves, and this is what the other princes will take a stand against. If you can find and defeat the Cloudreavers on the open sea, a Bloodsail captain would shake your hand. But if you attack the islands, you're striking against them all. There are only so many ports a ship can berth on the Khorvairian continent, and presumably, in each port, a Windwright captain exists. Being a monopoly in sea shipping also means that you have a representative in practically every mainland port. Send word by Sivis, and Mika is nailed. Every non-Windwright ship will probably nevertheless be identified, logged, and noted. If the ship isn't from the mainland, it's probably a Lhazaar ship. Based on where Mika attacked, it would be a cinch to track her down. Moreover, the sea lanes are limited. With their knowledge of weather magic, Lyrandar can track down any of the possible places Mika can hide and send a local warfleet to intercept, possibly with local nation-based support. It's not a matter of a single terrorist against a nation here. Lyrandar is a sea power and it knows its business well. The matter is probably quite similar to a Celebes Pirate King having the balls to kill a relative of the Chinese Emperor - if China were primarily a sea power. He can run, but eventually, he'll be going down one way or another. The Chinese Emperor probably would not have minded if he had killed some Chinese trader nobody, but family is family, and it would embarass the Emperor among the East Asian kingdoms if he were not able to rectify the insult. Similarly, Lyrandar would not end its efforts at sea if you angered it enough - as killing a Dragonmarked Heir would likely do. It would trade favors with Thuranni to see you dead. It would meet with Ryger and discuss concessions in exchange for your head. It would put a bounty on your head and set every last adventurer on the open sea on your tail and hunt you down like the dog that you are. I really don't think Mika is stupid enough to knowingly attract such attention without some dire reason. On the Balance of Power at Sea: I'm glad that Keith had the time to help us out with this discussion. Both the history and the current state of affairs is important in determining what the Pirates are and how they survive. 1. Lyrandar is the preeminent power at sea, both by economic and by military means. However, they are cautious to the point of paranoia regarding revelaing the exact extent of their military power. Even a rumor suggesting that Lyrandar already has the most powerful navy must be quashed. Adventure idea: the PCs, under the protectorate of Lyrandar, witness a sea battle between a young Lyrandar captain and some pirates. In his zeal, the Lyrandar forgets caution and crushes the pirates completely within sight of his protectorate vessel. The PCs witness the awesome sea power of a Lyrandar Ship of the Line. Soon, the PCs find that their word and reputation has been tarnished everywhere they go. Why? 2. The Five Nations are rightfully concerned about the potential political implications of what amounts to worldwide Mage Guilds headed by people with natural magical gifts. Galifar, as a united nation, kept them in control. The kings and queens of post-Galifar Khorvaire watch them with concern. What can the Five Nations do against a Dragonmarked House? Adventure idea: The King's Lanterns approach the PCs with a strange request: shadow a Lyrandar merchant vessel and record approximate daily mileage in a log. Even stranger, the Lyrandar vessel, while seemingly friendly, does everything it can possibly do to mess up the logs and lose the PCs. What gives? 3. Lhazaar Pirates attack vessels near the Principality only depending on how fast it is and which flag it flies. Clearly, they choose their prey with caution, skill, and experience. Adventure idea: A Lyrandar Ship of the Line flounders off the coast of the Principalities with all hands lost. Cause is unknown. The PCs are hired by Thuranni (!) to recover the ship's flag (?). They are met by a group from Lyrandar seeking to uncover the circumstances of the ship's demise. En route, they encounter a veritable swarm of pirate ships seeking some unknown prize. What exactly was the Lyrandar ship carrying? 4. Lhazaar pirates act with unity and a veneer of comradeship when faced with an invader. This has protected them from being swallowed by a greater power for hundreds of years. What is the Pirate's Code? Are the PCs protected by it? Adventure idea: The PCs are secretly approached by Lyrandar to take an independent armada and assault Port Krag with intent to destroy as much as possible before leaving. Astoundingly, not one pirate shows up to defend the civilian populace. Moreover, the PCs are then harried and attacked by Lyrandar vessels. Who really hired them in the first place? Where are all the pirates? What the heck is Lyrandar doing by attacking in retaliation to an attack on something that doesn't involve them anyway? Concept: The Lyrandar Flag Flags are important things at sea. They proclaim your alliegance from a long ways off so that people can see who you're from and for without having to overhaul you and ask questions. They inspire confidence and comradeship. However, like any means of communication, they can also be used to fool, demoralize, and abuse. Lyrandar (like any other House) takes pride in the fact that it protects its own. The fact that it has a core fleet that's actually Lyrandar and supervises an industry that seeks to have as much support from them as possible makes flags important. If you have a reputation, you protect it, not only from those who seek to tarnish it, but also from those who seek to copy and/or mock it. Correspondingly, Lyrandar can act to protect its reputation in the following ways: 1. Hire Sivis to assist in making Lyrandar flags. That way, each flag, even from a distance, is uniquely Lyrandar in a manner similar to money. A ship flying the Lyrandar flag is probably the genuine thing. Because of the cost, this would probably be limited to primary fleet flags. Lyrandar-approved vessels can carry alternate design flags, possibly also designed to indicate home port and nationality, but there is no need for such an extent of protection. 2. Lyrandar will act to protect its flags in a manner similar to the way Kundarak protects money and modern nations protect police badges. There's really not that many of it, so they can afford to do this, and doing this bears directly on their prestige, so they'll be interested in it. A lost flag is more than just so much cloth material. It's a sign of Lyrandar weakness. Thus, even if a fool were to succesfully make or steal a Sivis-made Lyrandar flag, he'd better only fly it where Lyrandar won't notice. This makes for an interesting situation. You have a premium flag that indicates high level protection from a powerful Dragonmarked House. Is it wise to always raise it? If you were a pirate and you saw a Lyrandar flag being raised, would you attack it anyway? More to the point, if you see what appears to be a fat merchantman with a Lyrandar flag being hurriedly hidden after it sights you, would you attack such a ship? Concept: the Secret Nature of the Mark of Storms: The Mark of Storms is an astoundingly strong wartime sea power. It has some value stragetically, but the tactical implications are vast. Even just obscuring mist can allow you to sneak a ship past a blockade. More importantly, the speed and direction at which a ship can be maneuvered using wind's favor is the decisive factor. While Galifar can certainly ask for an Heir to examine, it would be greatly to Lyrandar's (and the other Houses') favor if they can hide exactly what it is that the Marks can and cannot do. Especially in the case of Lyrandar, the limited duration and the awesome power of the Mark of Storms leads me to believe that they would never use the Mark to launch a ship from a populated area. The sheer awe-inspiring ability to move a ship at speed when every other ship is beached cannot fail to impress upon any onlooker as to the potential military power such a thing can give. Moreover, never doing so can fool kings and other leaders into believing that the Mark cannot be used in such a manner. Thus, a Lyrandar Heir might very well be instructed never to use any of the powers of the Mark on a ship except when in the open sea. Moreover, the strategic power of the Mark cannot also be openly divulged without suggesting to canny observers what the tactical advantages must be like. Thus, just because a Lyrandar vessel can make use of the Mark of Storms is not reason enough to use it to gain just plain money. There must be more at stake for a Storm Vessel to so brazenly use its wind's favor. Next: Prey on the Open Seas So you can't prey on a primary core fleet from the Lyrandar House. What can you prey on, and how? What riches can you expect when you overhaul a fat Galleon? Can you ransom a Captain or his crew for money? |
| Korhal_IV05-11-05, 02:58 AM | Khorvairian ships have things better than torpedoes! They have Fireball! One shot from a torpedo can sink a vessel, but it wasn't too likely. A single shot from a fireball will ignite every single exposed rigging and likely burn all the sails to a crisp, not to mention the superstructure. Even if the ship somehow manages to miraculously survive the first shot, it'll be almost completely dead on the water. It's an oft-overlooked fact that Fireball expressly does not, in fact, set things on fire, as the heat is extremely brief. Objects also take half damage from spells, and subtract hardness, so your lowest-level Fireball will do exactly 10 damage to a ship, about enough to crisp the wooden surface. Unless you get an archmage in there, Fireball's not a one-hit-kill, and if you get an archmage in there, you've got more worries than just Fireball. :surrender I also do think Lyrandar would sell Wheels of Wind and Water - they're in the business of making money, after all. If some well-heeled Aundairian nobleman wants one, well, it's just a question of price. I don't think Lyrandar would be so overwhelmingly excited about being the only air power. For starters, air power's a highly under-developed concept in Eberron (it took the real world until late WW2 to figure it out, even though there were massive dogfights and bombing runs in WW1). Secondly, while Lyrandar might be building a defensive fleet, they are building it to defend their mercantile interests - giving up wagonloads of cash for a small military advantage (in their eyes) is the move a general would make, not a merchant. And Lyrandar is a house of merchants. Thirdly, selling a Wheel is hardly conceding aerial supremacy. Lyrandar knows exactly who has what, and no independent noble will be able to build a fleet to rival Lyrandar - heck, most nations can't afford that expense! Not to mention the heavy political retributions that the owner of an unaffiliated airship might face. It's a sort of "join us or else" proposition coming from every nation. I think the Cloudreavers have the muscle and the brains to execute a strike on a Lyrandar core vessel and survive. I don't think they'll cross that line, though, unless there's something absurdly important on board, just because Lyrandar might NOT be bluffing... Keith: I too want to know what Lyrandar is carrying back and forth that brings them anywhere near Lhazaar. Are they heading to Sarlona and back? |
| MavrickWeirdo05-11-05, 02:59 AM | Another little detail, from page 187 ECS "Gray Tide: Tendrils of gray mist rise abovethe gray waters that flow east of Krag and Lastpoint islands. It is said that the mists can disorient any crew that encounters them, and that something vile and terrible lives at the center of this unnatural tide. Whatever the truth of these legends, ships that sail too close to the Gray Tide often disappear and are never heard from again." Gray Tide + Cloudreavers = ? Discuss |
| Hellcow05-11-05, 12:10 PM | You're absolutely right! In that case, I'm surprised that Lyrandar would sell any wheel of wind and water to anyone at all. It would be utterly pointless of them to do so, since the item in question can only be used by an heir of the Mark of Storm. The only people they might sell them to would be Lyrandar captains who choose not to be part of the central fleet (for example, a PC Lyrandar heir). A WoW&W is not required to control an elemental vessel, it's what allows the Lyrandar to do it flawlessly. Finally, Lyrandar has no interest in invading the Principalities, so if it ever made a point of invading one port as a matter of protecting its prestige, it would probably make sure that it was a "joint" venture with, say, Prince Ryger, just so there would be no misunderstanding. And in so doing, Rygar would incur the wrath of every other prince for siding with outsiders against a prince following the traditions of her people - and I doubt he'd stay High Prince for long. Rygar is attempting to bring more unity to the region, but supporting an outside military action is not going to do that - it will make him appear to be a toady for foreign powers. Even among Rygar's own subjects, this is the sort of thing that would show him as unfit to rule and draw a lot of attempted mutinies or coups. Princes would respect the Cloudreavers for challenging the greater power - that's courage that should be rewarded, not abandoned. Now, if Rygar was convinced to act on his own, without any obvious ties to Lyrandar, that's another story entirely - but he'll have to consider such a thing to be worth his while, and he has pride as well. I'm saying here that while I think Prince Mika is a powerful pirate, I think she's too canny to allow herself to attack an actual Lyrandar core fleet vessel. Certainly - the whole idea of a core fleet is that if you're on such a ship you feel secure. As I noted before, I'd consider pirate attacks on Lyrandar vessels to be rare in any case - and that Mika wouldn't attack any vessel she felt she couldn't take, and there's more to that than simply "could she capture the vessel itself." On the other hand, if you take that idea too far, you end up having to deal with complacency. The houses have been around for over a thousand years. You yourself said that what they need military power for is to defend their interests. If reputation alone becomes a shield, then no other defense is needed - until someone shockingly goes against tradition. While a second-tier Lyrandar-approved vessel can be taken by pirates without that much repercussion from Lyrandar, too much predation can make the cost of hunting them down to the last dog less expensive than the cost of sustaining the losses, and that's always a bad position to be in as a pirate. More ominously, the cost of sustaining pirate attacks can eventually make the route unprofitable, and that's more dangerous to the pirates than mere Lyrandar ire. Agreed on both counts. Killing Prince Mika wouldn't stop another Prince from taking her place, but hopefully, this Prince would prove wiser and stay well away from the Heirs. Perhaps - or perhaps this prince would rise to power on the claim that he would make the outsiders pay the price for the insult the foreigners inflicted upon the Lhazaar... engaging in even more unwise direct attacks on Lyrandar vessels because he's driven by vengeance instead of a desire for profit. And now we move from piracy to terrorism, which is a very different problem. Generally, I agree with you. An heir with the lesser mark is a valuable commodity to both House and Pirate; losing a cargo is one thing, losing an heir is another. The pirates might ransom the heir, but they might even just let them go, taking only the cargo; again, the amount of trouble they present to the house is going to reflect the effort the house puts into fighting them. With that said, the issue is that you're considering the lengths that Lyrandar will go to protect its reputation, without considering the lengths the princes will go to to protect theirs. LYRANDAR and even the Five Nations may consider the House of Storm to be the greatest power on the sea - no Lhazaar Prince will accept that claim. Even if the Lhazaar know better than to directly challenge the House, they will always claim that they could if they chose to. And if this pride is threatened, they will react accordingly. Hence, if Mika is obviously killed by Lyrandar, that's an act that calls for vengeance. So if it DOES come to killing Mika, far better to do it subtly than through military action - though again, if you do manage to catch her vessel in the Thunder Sea and kill her there, you've beaten her fair and square and good for you. It's attacking her at Krag that the Lhazaar would take offense at. 1. I don't expect Lyrandar to squander its prestige needlessly on Guild vessels as opposed to House vessels. House vessels might carry the Storm flag with the House emblem whereas Guild vessels might fly the Windwrights flag with some other design on it. Agreed. If it had the navy of Galifar to watch over it, Lyrandar would not have needed that much of a military arm. I'm not sure I follow. They DID have the navy of Galifar to watch over them, which is why they didn't need much of a military arm. And yes, that has no changed. If that's all you meant with this point, then we are again in agreement. Khorvairian ships have things better than torpedoes! They have Fireball! One shot from a torpedo can sink a vessel, but it wasn't too likely. Well, first you have the issue of the damage caused by fireball. But if you accept your vision of it, that's exactly my point. If you're trying to DESTROY the ship, that's easy to do. If you're tyring to capture and board it without destroying it, that's more of a challenge. Unless your thought is that a fireball would destroy the sail while leaving the rest of the ship intact - but at that point I think that fire-resistant sails become something Lyrandar would have developed by now, and would probably be in use by most military ships. If fireball is used by military powers - which it is - and fireball would normally instantly cripple a vessel with sails, after a century of war I'd either expect people to have devised a counter or given up on sea travel. You must understand that piracy is based on economic factors as well, and a rather delicate balance of economic factors at that. Certainly. But another point is that the Lhazaar are not simply pirates; they are also raiders. Over the course of the last century, they have also preyed on coastal villages. That's a practice that has dropped since the end of the Last War, since now the nations can turn their eyes to stopping these raids - but they certainly took advantage of the chaos of the war. As for trade routes: Aerenal ships goods and lumber. There are at least two trade routes with Sarlona, one flowing through Q'barra, the other to Sharn. Xen'drik is a source of dragonshards and other goods, while Stormreach seeks many goods. Gnomish trade often passes by sea; while it could go by land, my (possibly mistaken) belief is that sea travel would be swifter. And that's just a few thoughts off the top of my head; I'm sure you can come up with more. Not really. You underestimate concentration of firepower. In the ancient Aegean sea, the Persian navy was the most powerful in terms of number, and they had the most experienced seamen. In which case, assuming that they WANT to do so, doesn't the same hold true for a group of Lhazaar ships attacking a Lyrandar vessel? :) There are only so many ports a ship can berth on the Khorvairian continent, and presumably, in each port, a Windwright captain exists. Being a monopoly in sea shipping also means that you have a representative in practically every mainland port. Send word by Sivis, and Mika is nailed. Every non-Windwright ship will probably nevertheless be identified, logged, and noted. Ah, now we come back to our difference of opinion. You're trying to logically prove how a thing can't exist. I'm trying to say "If a thing is interesting for story purposes, I want it to exist - even if, on some levels it defies logic." Thus, I am searching for ways to make it possible. Eberron is inspired by pulp movies - and how often do the pulps really put realism before drama? I'd argue that if the Cloudreavers do venture so far from home, it has to be because they have access to some sort of hidden smuggler's ports. You're absolutely right: if Mika's ship docks at Sharn, she's screwed. Therefore, she doesn't ever dock at Sharn. This also comes back to the issues of the delicate economic issues of piracy. It's possible that one could prove that there is no basis for piracy in Eberron. I'm more interested in challenging you to find a way to prove that there is. If I go to see Pirates of the Carribean, a scholar coming in to explain to me the inaccuracies and impossibility of the story doesn't make me enjoy it, however much I respect his knowledge. I certainly want Eberron to be as logical and realistic as possible; that is a goal of the world. But again, the setting was inspired by pulp novels and film, not by the real world. When I use pirates, I'm more concerned with them matching the pirates of the movies than the pirates of history. If both can be accomplished, I am thrilled - but I'll certainly err on the side of a colorful story if it's a choice between that and a more mundane reality. While the power of the houses is interesting for story purposes, a world that is TOO stable, a system that is TOO perfect, is not. Therefore, the challenge is finding ways to make dangers plausible. I will note that any ship Mika would bring far from home would have to be outfitted with nondetection capabilities to keep standard divination from tracking her down. One interesting possibility is illusion: what if she possesses the ability to completely change the appearance of her ship? At the same time, I think we're arguing in circles, because fundamentally we agree: The Lhazaar pirates would know better than to push Lyrandar too far, and would rarely attack a core vessel or kill a Lyrandar heir with the lesser mark. But I still maintain that just because something is unlikely doesn't mean that it will never happy, if it suits the story for it to happen. And while I have nothing specific to say on them, excellent ideas throughout your Balance of Power section (many of which meet my challenge of how to make interesting stories even in a more stable system). |
| Siran Dunmorgan05-11-05, 08:26 PM | As for trade routes: Aerenal ships goods and lumber. There are at least two trade routes with Sarlona, one flowing through Q'barra, the other to Sharn. Xen'drik is a source of dragonshards and other goods, while Stormreach seeks many goods. Gnomish trade often passes by sea; while it could go by land, my (possibly mistaken) belief is that sea travel would be swifter. And that's just a few thoughts off the top of my head; I'm sure you can come up with more. It's not time: it's weight. Seagoing vessels can carry a greater weight of cargo than pretty much any other form of transportation. Let's say, for instance, that you want to get rice from the Shadow Marches to Aundair. You can ship it overland, e.g., you can give your courier team one bag of rice, and they can ride their mounts out of the Marches, through Droaam and the Eldeen wilderness and so to Aundair within a couple of weeks, because a horse doesn't even notice the weight of one bag of rice, call it fifty pounds. But if you're trying to make a living selling Shadow Marches rice in the Five Nations, you aren't going to be shipping it one bag at a time. You're going to be shipping it in lots of upwards of fifty tons at a time. There are few commercially viable means of handling that kind of load, and the only one within reach of most operations is seaborne shipping.[1] Even at that, there are going to be costs involved that have nothing to do with simple carriage of goods: most captains avoid sailing near the coast of the Demon Wastes when they can, for example, and this allows a trade route that carries cargoes from the Marches, to Breland, to Zilargo, to Valenar, to New Galifar, the Holds, Karrnath, Aundair, Thrane, and back. Much of that trade therefore necessarily passes through the Principalities. The real issue with the Principalities is that the Captains foster what could be characterized as a hunter-gatherer culture, where the 'prey' is shipping. It's not always around the Principalities, and the Lhazaar are not the only predators: a lot of ships out of Aerenal fall prey to Seren, rather than Lhazaar, pirates, for example. The economic effect of Lhazaar piracy, however, is different from Seren: the Seren are carrying on the Draconic tradition of war with the Aerenal, and denying resources to the enemy, while occasionally enhancing their own vessels with the advantages of Aerenal lumber: they're mostly in it to sink Aerenal shipping. By contrast, the Lhazaar are, for lack of a better term, simply imposing an informal use-fee for their territorial waters. What makes Lhazaar piracy different from, say, Karrnathi 'customs fees' is that while the Karrnathi might, for example, attain one-twentieth of the cargo from every ship that calls at Karrnathi ports, the Lhazaar will not infrequently seize one entire ship out of every twenty that passes through the Principalities; the actual net loss to the shipping companies—Orien, Lyrandar, and the lesser merchants—is actually lower than it is in customs fees, duties, harborage fees, tariffs, and other government-imposed fees in other nations for the reason that a simple show of force is likely to convince most Lhazaar 'customs patrols' to back off, whereas there is no similarly easy way around a Karrnathi harbormaster, who can summon a significant military force at need. To sum up: the most cost effective way to ship a really large weight of goods is by surface watercraft, the consequence of which is that there is a lot of trade passing through the Principalities. The merchant combines do not gather together to crush the Lhazaar because, while the Lhazaar way of doing business is annoying, it is not necessarily a greater net expense than the normal payment of shipping-related fees to other governments. —Siran Dunmorgan [1] I understand that magic can obviate some of these issues; if Orien were to develop something on the scale of the Breland mobile fortresses for use as overland cargo-carrying vessels, for example. But they haven't done so yet. One adventure hook, for those of you who want yet another excuse to paw through Xen'drik ruins, is too find a good source of the 'blocks' the cloud giants used to use to build the foundations for their sky castles. Figuring out how to build those would go a long way toward breaking the Lyrandar monopoly on air travel, hm? Especially since they obviously don't need a dragonmark to use effectively. |
| MavrickWeirdo05-11-05, 09:46 PM | the actual net loss to the shipping companies—Orien, Lyrandar, and the lesser merchants—is actually lower than it is in customs fees, duties, harborage fees, tariffs, and other government-imposed fees in other nations —Siran Dunmorgan Except that the shipper pays both 'fees'. So, over time you send 20 shiploads of rice to Karrnathi. The 19 that arrive pay the Karrnathi 'customs fees' (1/20th of cargo). The 1 that doesn't arrive is also a 'cost'. Assuming all the shipments were the same size, that's a 9% loss on rice, plus the cost of the lost ship & crew. (Pirates rarely unload the cargo then let the crew sail off.) |
| Neofish05-11-05, 10:53 PM | It's not time: it's weight. [1] I understand that magic can obviate some of these issues; if Orien were to develop something on the scale of the Breland mobile fortresses for use as overland cargo-carrying vessels, for example. But they haven't done so yet. . They have, it's called the lightning rail, and while I believe it could transport as much as a seagoing vessel, I can see where the problem becomes getting the product to the rail station rather than thoughtout the world. |
| Just another user05-12-05, 07:36 AM | The assumption is that Pirates exist. So. For pirates to exist, they must prey on something. So much is established. However, Lyrandar suffer such pirates to exist. Why? Option 1: Lyrandar is powerless to stop them. Pirates are actually the most powerful force on the water, not Lyrandar. ... Option 2: Lyrandar actually funds some of these privateers. They keep the Guildsmen in line by funding privateers who sink the ships of captains who refuse to follow Guild rules and regulations. ... Option 3: Lyrandar isn't an actual monopoly. They just like to think they are. ... Option 4) to get rid of the Pirates would cost more resources than what the pirates actually plunder. |
| Roxlimn05-13-05, 10:17 AM | Great responses all around!!!! :D I want to reiterate my thanks to Hellcow for continuing to grace us with his posts. :bow: A few important points to answer: On the use of Fireball in Open Sea combat: Korhal IV: It's an oft-overlooked fact that Fireball expressly does not, in fact, set things on fire, as the heat is extremely brief. from the PHB: "A fireball spell is an explosion of flame that detonates with a low roar and deals 1d6 points of fire damage per caster level (maximum 10d6) to every creature within the area. Unattended objects also take this damage." No mention is made of how long the explosion lasts. Moreover, cloths and ropes which typically have low hardness and hitpoint ratings tend to get blown away by something even like a fireball. In fact, it's well within the object parameters to rule that cloths and ropes are "especially vulnerable to flame" and overrule the half damage general rule and possibly ignore hardness. More from the PHB: "The fireball sets fire to combustibles and damages objects in the area." Wood is a combustible. So are cloths and rope. So fireball sets fire to practically every single thing it touches on a wooden Sail Age ship. I suppose you can put out a fireball spell with water, but I doubt there'll be anything of the sails left to save. Hellcow: Well, first you have the issue of the damage caused by fireball. But if you accept your vision of it, that's exactly my point. If you're trying to DESTROY the ship, that's easy to do. If you're tyring to capture and board it without destroying it, that's more of a challenge. Unless your thought is that a fireball would destroy the sail while leaving the rest of the ship intact - but at that point I think that fire-resistant sails become something Lyrandar would have developed by now, and would probably be in use by most military ships. If fireball is used by military powers - which it is - and fireball would normally instantly cripple a vessel with sails, after a century of war I'd either expect people to have devised a counter or given up on sea travel. Well, there is a historical counterpoint to fireball - Greek fire, except that Greek fire was really only usable at relatively short ranges, or otherwise without a great deal of accuracy. I suspect that Medeterrainian ships employed oars primarily because of this development. Not that Greek Fire was unknown to Exploration Age vessels, of course. Using fire to cripple a ship is a well-worn and well-known tactic. Shipmen from most continents and regions used fire arrows specifically to take out enemy sails, whether they were the sails of a Chinese junk, a Malayan corsair, or a Portugese Carrack. Even if you ruled out fireball, a host of relatively minor spell effects have a devastating effect on sea warfare. Lightning Bolt can easily take out the main sail or sails, even of a two-masted craft, and can very probably sink most small craft, too. I hope to speculate on the effects of spells from spell levels 1-6 on Khorvairian war at sea, eventually. Summon Monster: Air or Fire Elemental is pretty nasty, too. And then there's casting warp wood on the wheel or sleet storm on the main deck, to say nothing of Evard's black tentacles, shout (ignores hardness, full damage!), and fabricate (fabricate holes into the ship, or make shirts out of the main sails!). No, if we are to seriously think about warfare on the high seas using D&D style magic, I'd say fireball is pretty minor league. Of course, the problem with using fireball for piratical purposes is that you are likely to destroy the ship. Very likely, the main concept behind not using fire during the Age of Exploration was that you could capture an enemy vessel and outfit it to add to your fleet, instead of simply burning everything as you go. It's certainly quite efficient. Presumably, if your ship mage was stupid enough to use fireball on the enemy ship, he or she would have some means of putting out the fires. Lightning bolt, on the other hand, whilst also setting fire to combustibles, also has a much more manageable area. It also lets you target enemies without killing your comrades, and destroys things more judiciously. If I had to choose a capture damage spell, it would be lightning bolt, not fireball. I don't know about the Ship Mage feat and fire-resistant sails, though. On one hand, you remove one of the greatest drawbacks of using stuff like fireball, and on the other hand, you castrate one of the greatest crippling effects of the same. Seems to me like you're simply trying to shoehorn fireball into being a purely anti-personnel spell, kinda like grapeshot, which is isn't. It makes much more sense to me to speculate on how fireball would naturally affect ship combat before trying on a "solution" as hardline as fire-resistant sails. Asbestos-like sails are no biggie, mind you, but even in the real world where there's quite a lot of fire hazards around a ship, asbestos sails never because de riguer, even for warships. Moreover, most shipping doesn't get attacked by fireballs or lightning bolts or any such like. The argument for fire-resistant sails, if they ever were a strong one, would likely involve only warships. Sale of Wheels of Wind and Water: Korhal IV: I also do think Lyrandar would sell Wheels of Wind and Water - they're in the business of making money, after all. If some well-heeled Aundairian nobleman wants one, well, it's just a question of price. I don't think Lyrandar would be so overwhelmingly excited about being the only air power. Microsoft is also in the business of making money. You don't see Microsoft selling off trade secrets and key intellectual property, now, do you? The importance of monopoly cannot be lost on a Dragonmarked House - a house centered on economic power and that's been an experienced monopoly for hundreds of years. Hellcow: It would be utterly pointless of them to do so, since the item in question can only be used by an heir of the Mark of Storm. The only people they might sell them to would be Lyrandar captains who choose not to be part of the central fleet (for example, a PC Lyrandar heir). A WoW&W is not required to control an elemental vessel, it's what allows the Lyrandar to do it flawlessly. I don't know about that. A Lyrandar PC who's actually got a Dragonmark would very probably be a House member, or a hunted fugitive. Either or. At the very least, someone Lyrandar keeps very close tabs on. In order to secure loyalty, Lyrandar might offer a Wheel of Wind and Water for free, provided... ...well, you get the picture. Much better than selling the PC the damned thing. Such a PC can be awarded a special vessel and granted troubleshooting jobs or errant responsibilities - tackling important problems for Lyrandar as he sees fit. I can easily see Wheels being loaned to PCs for this purpose, and it also simplifies matters for me - as the ship is primarily a transport mode, not requiring the PC to buy the Wheel frees me from the problem of deciding whether it should be eating into his wealth per level allocation and by how much. Moreover, keeping close tabs on all the Wheels in existence is especially important when you consider the fact that some Lhazaar pirates are sporting the Mark of Storms. Some yahoo pirate masquerading as a Lyrandar, complete with an Elemental Vessel would be a big problem for Lyrandar, and I don't see them not attending to this before it ever becomes a problem. Specific replies to intersting questions: Hellcow: And in so doing, Rygar would incur the wrath of every other prince for siding with outsiders against a prince following the traditions of her people - and I doubt he'd stay High Prince for long. Rygar is attempting to bring more unity to the region, but supporting an outside military action is not going to do that - it will make him appear to be a toady for foreign powers. Even among Rygar's own subjects, this is the sort of thing that would show him as unfit to rule and draw a lot of attempted mutinies or coups. Princes would respect the Cloudreavers for challenging the greater power - that's courage that should be rewarded, not abandoned. I don't know about that. Rygar is fighting to try to get the Lhazaarites accepted into mainstream society as a major player, and most of the Lhazaar ambassadors are spending an awful lot of time denying accusations of piracy. If it ever came to a non-war war (a war no one wants to acknowledge because it would be inconvinient for both sides), I think Rygar is too clever to not realize that Lyrandar would have the upper hand. Instead, he would try to play sides each against the other. It is true that he might face the wrath of the Princes if he ever openly acknowledges a deal-making scheme with the scurvy Stormsuckers, but he doesn't have to ever openly acknowledge such a scheme. All he has to do is to redirect Lhazaar attention long enough for the Lyrandars to chastise Prince Mika in a manner acceptable to a Bloodsail captain. On the other hand, if you take that idea too far, you end up having to deal with complacency. The houses have been around for over a thousand years. You yourself said that what they need military power for is to defend their interests. If reputation alone becomes a shield, then no other defense is needed - until someone shockingly goes against tradition. Well, yes and no. I don't think Prince Mika is powerful enough to attack Lyrandar openly and get away with it. Rygar may be powerful enough to attack Lyrandar surreptitiously and convince the House that it's best for them to pretend that they didn't know what happened. I believe that for a pirate to openly attack Lyrandar ships, he would have to be more powerful still. Perhaps - or perhaps this prince would rise to power on the claim that he would make the outsiders pay the price for the insult the foreigners inflicted upon the Lhazaar... engaging in even more unwise direct attacks on Lyrandar vessels because he's driven by vengeance instead of a desire for profit. And now we move from piracy to terrorism, which is a very different problem. Well, no. We would move from piracy to a non-war war, which I mentioned earlier. Terrorism only occurs in guerilla warfare style tactics, something that doesn't really happen on the open seas, and something that isn't really the thing for pirates to do. Thuranni and Phiarlan, yes, Lhazaar pirates, no. All Lyrandar has to do is protect all their interests long enough to run the pirates dry, possibly even move ship routes. Eventually, the lack of incoming resources makes piracy impractical as a life occupation, and the Islanders will be forced to take up something else. It's harsh, but it's true. Pirates never win wars of this sort, even with guerilla tactics. In a very real way, pirates exist because the resource owners allow them to. If you **** off the merchants too much, you're a dead pirate, and it doesn't matter which era you're talking about. Even if the Lhazaar know better than to directly challenge the House, they will always claim that they could if they chose to. And if this pride is threatened, they will react accordingly. Hence, if Mika is obviously killed by Lyrandar, that's an act that calls for vengeance. So if it DOES come to killing Mika, far better to do it subtly than through military action - though again, if you do manage to catch her vessel in the Thunder Sea and kill her there, you've beaten her fair and square and good for you. It's attacking her at Krag that the Lhazaar would take offense at. It may be a feature unique to Lhazaarites pirates, but almost no pirate ever considers anything "by the rules." They're more of "guidelines," really. ;) By definition, a pirate belongs to a culture that believes that might is right. In my opinion, if Lyrandar can take Mika, whether by knife, by blockade, or by sea, it's a "fair" thing as far as pirates are concerned. Heck - they'd do pretty much the same thing! Attacking Krag civilians might be going over what's considered core tradition, but attacking Mika's fleet as it is, I don't see that as being considered "unfair." It's just too contradictory to sound sane, even to a pirate. I don't ignore the issue of the pride of the princes. Taking a Windwright Blockade Runner on the open seas might be a badge of honor for them, who knows, right? But pirates are nothing if not practical and if taking on a Lyrandar Ship of the Line would be suicide, no pirate would cheer Mika on, even if she was doing it "for the pride of Lhazaar!" They'd probably just laugh or shake their collective heads behind her back and pick her corpse clean. Now, the issue becomes, "If they're so contentious, how can they possibly resist assimilation by conquest?" The answer is simple: they have a simple and straightforward rule that even they acknowledge. This might be banding together by religion, or by nation, but whatever it is, it really only triggers when a force is clearly bent on taking over the Isles. I'm not sure I follow. They DID have the navy of Galifar to watch over them, which is why they didn't need much of a military arm. And yes, that has no changed. If that's all you meant with this point, then we are again in agreement. It has changed. Galifar is no longer in existence, and the contention between the Five Nations leaves much less of whatever is left to guard Lyrandar interests, even if national sentiment were currently favorable for Lyrandar. Prey on the Open Seas part 1: Hellcow: As for trade routes: Aerenal ships goods and lumber. There are at least two trade routes with Sarlona, one flowing through Q'barra, the other to Sharn. Xen'drik is a source of dragonshards and other goods, while Stormreach seeks many goods. Gnomish trade often passes by sea; while it could go by land, my (possibly mistaken) belief is that sea travel would be swifter. And that's just a few thoughts off the top of my head; I'm sure you can come up with more. In almost all cases, travel by land is preferrable, where possible. Especially when you have things like refrigerated and vaulted Orien carriages, passage by sea becomes much more questionable. A sea route through Q'barra would probably avoid most of the Lhazaar islands. Likewise, a Sharn route would also likely avoid most of that area as well. A ship route through Xen'drik would head almost directly south from the mainland. I don't know about Gnomish trade passing by sea. An awful lot of that country is inland and mounatainous, and they've had the fortune of almost always being at peace with their neighbor. A land-based route would be much less susceptible to disruption by piracy and enemy ships, and it would also make more sense, since much of the goods need to penetrate inland anyways. Travel by sea is not swifter since you often have to go around, whereas you almost always can go directly by land. There's a very good reason why porcelain and silk traveled best by the Silk Road and not borne on the ships of Dutch merchants. Travel by sea is only preferrable if the end-target arrival area is by the sea and/or the sea route is shorter or safer than the land route. The Galleon trade passing through the Central Americas from the Spice Islands was done partly because of the influence of the South China pirates, and partly because travel through South Africa was judged riskier. Pirates can't go too far away from wherever they berth. In the first place, food and water necessities force them to have limited range, and in the second place, damage by sea and storm necessitate regular stocks and resupply. If Lhazaar pirates are striking vessels coming in from Xen'drik, then they would most probably have some sort of port nearby, and would probably eventually stop going to the Principalities altogether. Too, pirates need to regularly update foxholes, hiding banks, tricks, and other such means to lose pursuit and quickly disgorge booty. A fairly proximate port of berth is necessary. So no. If a ship route is to endure the threat of piracy, the sensible rule would be proximity, not incredible cross-continental distance. Clearly, some pretty major shipping routes somehow need to pass through the Principalities, containing items that are preferentially transported by sea instead of by rail. My first instinct would be Mror gold. If Mror gold were somehow mined mostly on the edge of the continent, a case could be made for the perils of transporting the gold underground, where the Orcs or worse creatures could ambush undergound caravans. Lyrandar can offer transport by sea to the nearest port after which it gets transported by secure rail back to the main vaults of the Kundarak in the proximate cities. I don't know. Something about heavy gold-laden ships somehow appeals to me. Luxury items from the Principalities themselves could be sold to coastal dwarven settlements and then brought back to the main by Windwright shipping. Sarlona routes do, of course, pass through the Principalities, but I get the impression that there really isn't much of that going on. And the question, of course, is which goods? Crysteel? Perfume? Silks? Siran Dunmorgan: Let's say, for instance, that you want to get rice from the Shadow Marches to Aundair. You can ship it overland, e.g., you can give your courier team one bag of rice, and they can ride their mounts out of the Marches, through Droaam and the Eldeen wilderness and so to Aundair within a couple of weeks, because a horse doesn't even notice the weight of one bag of rice, call it fifty pounds. Good point, bad article. Rice was almost never traded in the old days by sea because rice is especially susceptible to water damage. If your rice gets so much as a splash of water on it, it's ruined. And, of course, there's a certain time limit to the transport of such perishable cargo. Besides, rice isn't efficient on a cost per weight basis. You could do much, much better with stuff like iron ore, pots, porcelain, metals, salt, spices, baskets, and other such manufactured or luxury items. Even at that, there are going to be costs involved that have nothing to do with simple carriage of goods: most captains avoid sailing near the coast of the Demon Wastes when they can, for example, and this allows a trade route that carries cargoes from the Marches, to Breland, to Zilargo, to Valenar, to New Galifar, the Holds, Karrnath, Aundair, Thrane, and back. I get the feeling that when you're trying to transport something from the Marches to Aundair while avoiding the Demon Wastes, the land route is much, much, much, much shorter. In fact, if you simply follow the river going up Breland, you'll arrive much sooner at Aundair than you would if you had to travel all the way around. MaverickWeirdo: (Pirates rarely unload the cargo then let the crew sail off.) Depends on which pirates you're talking about, and which crew. Some pirates did, in fact, make a point of letting the crew off unharmed. Doing so is a show of strength - you don't really care if the crew can identify you or not, or whether they'll report back to the bosses. It's a message to the authorities that you're essentially asking for toll on the route, not unlike how some bandits would barricade a trade road and ask for toll, while generally protecting the road from other bandits. Many of the Carribean pirates, however, were a scurvy, dishonorable, theiving, sorry lot, so you can't really expect those guys to use such subtle means to essay a challenge. Then, too, that affair was essentially the British preying off of Spanish Galleons as privateers on an unofficial state of war. You can't expect them to spare lives in a wartime footing. Types of vessels: Typically, you would see things like Galleys and Carracks and Galleons as well as stuff like Caravels and largish Dromons. I imagine that shipwrights in Khorvaire have gone on to create things like Frigates, too. Form follows function, and where it does, beauty and functionality combine to give us the predominant ship form. The majority of shipping in Khorvaire is coastal by far, with only a token influence from open sea experiences. The ability to travel very swiftly in relatively calm, shallow waters would be of premium value to these people, much more so than prolonged survival in the Ocean Sea. In keeping with that, I'm presuming that the most common affair would be a single or double decked ship with relatively low water clearance on a full cargo. Canker-plank technique combined with superior materials would allow them to build a ship that would effectively hydroplane as it gained speed, pushing the craft mostly out of the water. This is especially advantageous for Lyrandar Heirs, as such a ship can fully take advantage of essentially having a tailwind whenever they're pressed. Both Skyforged Cannith technique and gnomish ingenuity can combine to form an advanced hull shape not too different from the semi-hydroplaning triple hulls we see on modern speedboats. A larger version of such a craft, made for war, can take additional advantage of Elemental propulsion, pushing tactical speeds even higher. Such a craft would no longer need or be limited by the need for wind power and masts and sails. Central spaces can be equipped with catapults, ballistae, or trebuchets, allowing more firepower per space per ship. The knowledge of how to make wider bodied ships would not die out, however, from the need to make cargo vessels. Without the limitations of wind power, Elemental Galleons can be truly large affairs with multiple decks and complicated cargo holds. Thus we can have the sleek, Galley/Longboat bloodline ship of war, with a trim foreshadow and a slightly lower waterline at rest, and we have the defensive Sea Castle deriving from the Galleon, with massive hulls that rise a dozen feet or more from the waterline, giving defenders the edge in defense against boarders. Oars would probably still be standard issue on warships, since the threat of being helpless on a becalmed sea against a Stormship would loom large in the face of any marine. A hybrid type of ship with cankerplanked triple hull and a slightly wider body for use in deeper water operations and for special functions like storm patrol would probably be something most navies would put some thought into. Mid-level independent Windwright captains would probably value the flexibility and the hardiness of such a vessel, so it's likely that many variations of vessels of this sort would be the "norm" for most Windwright shipping, leaving specialty Galleons and Ships of the Line to government and Lyrandar shipping. It's possible that Lyrandar would commission some ships of this type under false pretenses, to deter pirates and monitor Windwright captains. Ideas for Prince Mika and Pirates in general: I will note that any ship Mika would bring far from home would have to be outfitted with nondetection capabilities to keep standard divination from tracking her down. One interesting possibility is illusion: what if she possesses the ability to completely change the appearance of her ship? Actually, the appropriate ability would have to be private sanctum. Nondetection only protects one object or creature, and there are far too many people and objects in a ship (itself one object) to completely render the whole with just nondetection. Also, private sanctum can allow a ship so enveloped to blend in with a seabound fog, while allowing the mates to see from the inside. More than this, any ship Mika brings far from home had better have 2 level 5 Clerics each for food and water, and possibly some target port nearby to berth. I wouldn't agree with the illusion deal. She's Cloudreaver, after all, not Shadowship. I'd prefer something like massive fog-making magic followed up by powerful divinations and a suped-up gust of wind. She mires the target ship in fog, then divines the location by magic. She approaches the ship from a blindside, parting the fog as she goes. Moreover, just changing the ship's appearance won't keep a Windwright captain from reporting a strange vessel. Presumably, Lyrandar keeps tabs of where everything is. Any shipping tai-pan would. Any duplicate would be easy to spot. In which case, assuming that they WANT to do so, doesn't the same hold true for a group of Lhazaar ships attacking a Lyrandar vessel? No. That's exactly the point. Unless the Lhazaars can match wind's favor ship for ship, they can't concentrate firepower the way independently powered ships can. I keep thinking about how the Windwright Guild lays claim to virtually all seagoing magic in the Five Nations (in addition to the Dragonmarks!) and I shudder to think of the mass of ships Lhazaar will have to deal with if it seriously wants to fight. A fleet with independent power on each vessel essentially behaves more like a modern gasoline powered navy than a Sail Age one. Given otherwise equal sea magic, the independently powered ships will pick off the Sail Age ones one by one, starting with the trailing ship, being careful to stay on the tailwind end of the Sail Age fleet. The Sail Age ships will not be able to do anything against this. It'll be a slaughter. On Piracy, Pulp, and Keeping it Real: This also comes back to the issues of the delicate economic issues of piracy. It's possible that one could prove that there is no basis for piracy in Eberron. I'm more interested in challenging you to find a way to prove that there is. If I go to see Pirates of the Carribean, a scholar coming in to explain to me the inaccuracies and impossibility of the story doesn't make me enjoy it, however much I respect his knowledge. I certainly want Eberron to be as logical and realistic as possible; that is a goal of the world. But again, the setting was inspired by pulp novels and film, not by the real world. When I use pirates, I'm more concerned with them matching the pirates of the movies than the pirates of history. If both can be accomplished, I am thrilled - but I'll certainly err on the side of a colorful story if it's a choice between that and a more mundane reality. While the power of the houses is interesting for story purposes, a world that is TOO stable, a system that is TOO perfect, is not. Therefore, the challenge is finding ways to make dangers plausible. 1. Just because a system is stable doesn't mean that nothing is happening. It means that the overall situation is unchanging. I look at it much like a wrestling match. On the outside, nothing much seems to be happening, but when you wrestle, you know that every second in the match, you're actively trying maneuvers to tip the scales in your favor. Dynamism isn't necessarily related to stability. A stable system could have lots of dynamism, whereas a system that changes too rapidly could have too little of it. 2. It may be possible to "prove" that there is no basis for piracy in Khorvaire. However, that is not the case. There are pirates in Khorvaire, and specifically, the most notorious of them reside in the Lhazaar Principlalities. There is no need to prove this. It's a given. The challenge is to figure out how such a thing is possible, and more than that, how such a thing can be so plausible as to be perfectly natural! 3. I tend to discover that "mundane" reality has a quirky way of turning out to be a lot more colorful than anything the mind of man can possibly imagine. Following something to its logical conclusion gave us the colorful tapestry of Eberron. I don't intend to stop now. "Realistic grit" is the mainstay of many pulp novels, and by gar, I'm going to keep it that way! |
| Siran Dunmorgan05-13-05, 12:28 PM | Rice was almost never traded in the old days by sea because rice is especially susceptible to water damage. If your rice gets so much as a splash of water on it, it's ruined. And, of course, there's a certain time limit to the transport of such perishable cargo. Besides, rice isn't efficient on a cost per weight basis. You could do much, much better with stuff like iron ore, pots, porcelain, metals, salt, spices, baskets, and other such manufactured or luxury items. Heh. Depends on what you think of as "the old days," and on how waterproof your cargo containers are. Also, you underestimate the economic effect of the Last War on certain commodities. Now, the same sort of magic that evil adepts use to dry their neighbor's wells[1] can be used to keep an entire cargo of perishable goods clean and dry; this has been true since before the fall of the Dhakaani Empire, though the Goblinoids were never much for rice; they used similar magic to preserve cargoes of meats and what we would call 'jerky'. One of the effects of the founding of the Kingdom of Galifar was the encouragement of international—I use the term in the same sense as 'Five Nations'—trade. Certainly, the most highly valued 'crop' out of the Shadow Marches is Eberron dragonshards, but with the growth in trade over the lifetime of the old kingdom, rice became an important commodity, and a staple food in more than just the Marches and Breland. With the last century or so of warfare, rice became scarce elsewhere than the Marches, and with scarcity came a rise in market price. The trade has actually boomed since the end of the War, mostly because markets in Karrnath, Thrane, and Aundair are demanding it: rice is still considered an exotic food in the northern nations, and commands a relatively high price there—as opposed to Breland, where it has been popular since the first human settlements.[2] There have been some efforts to provide an alternative source, such as the establishment of rice plantations in Q'barra, but these have met with limited success at best. The other problem is transportation. Note that virtually all commercial traffic into or out of the Marches is by sea. There are good reasons for this: the top two include the lack of any firm ground on which to seat a good commercial roadbed, and the existence of Droaam. Now, once you've got a cargo on a ship, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to offload it and put it on lightning rail or caravans if you don't have to: it's simply a lot easier to sail it wherever you're going to sell it. So, overall, I'd say that rice is an important crop for the Marches, probably second in legal exports after Eberron dragonshards, that it pretty much has to be transported by sea, that the low-level magic needed to preserve it has been in use since before the daelkyr invasion, and that it's worth occasionally seizing a cargo of the stuff as it makes its way to Karrnath, Thrane, and Aundair. Obviously, there are other cargoes worth more—international trade isn't limited to rice—but you can't simply dismiss it out of hand, either. —Siran Dunmorgan [1] I'm using the non-player character class 'adept' here in the classic sense of the fairy-tale witch, e.g., the crotchety old woman who lives in the hut at the edge of the woods and spoils milk or dries wells for fun. In 'the old days', before the third edition, such characters would have had access to the destroy water spell at very low character levels. With the publication of the third edition, there is no longer a counterpoint to create water, but we are talking about 'the old days'. [2] There is also a sense of patriotism involved: rice is thought of as a Shadow Marches crop, and the Marches have never really been part of any of the Five Nations. A gentleman of Karrnath may dine upon rice dishes free of the concern that he is somehow supporting the Brelish economy, for example. Curoiusly, the best recipes for rice dishes come from the Talenta Plains, where rice is generally all but unknown. The halflings prize it whenever they can acquire some, and House Ghallanda has come up with an amazing fusion of traditional Talenta and Shadow Marches cuisines employing it: there is a dish called araska llandaba, for example, served in 'edgy' restaurants, that consists of boneless cubes of hammertail simmered in a thick, spicy sauce of dried peppers, cardamom, ground coriander seeds, dried rose hips, and cinnamon, then served over saffron rice steamed with red grapes and crushed chips of a kind of 'bacon' made from fried threehorn rinds. |
| Hellcow05-13-05, 01:25 PM | I don't know about that. A Lyrandar PC who's actually got a Dragonmark would very probably be a House member, or a hunted fugitive. Either or. I must respectfully disagree. Unless the PC is actively engaged in activities that threaten the reputation or business of the house - IE, starting up his own competing courier service, or flaunting his mark while engaging in politically questionable activities - Lyrandar simply doesn't have the resources to care about this. Excoriates and foundlings are out there. If they draw attention to themselves, they will be dealt with. But if they choose to live quiet lives, they will be allowed to. The idea that every foundling would be a hunted fugitive is a bit overkill. Thuranni or Phiarlan could pursue this approach, because it's the nature of their business; they just tell their agents "While you're doing whatever you're doing, watch for Joe." But Lyrandar would have to hire someone else to pursue such a vendetta, and if the character isn't engaging in threatening activities, why bother? And my suggestion was that the heir could be a member of the Windwright's Guild - in which case he IS acting in the service of the house, just at a slight distance. Again, you are welcome to your opinion and more draconian view, but in my opinion the houses do not, at this time, have this level of vindictive power; this is more in line with the War of the Mark. Though again, if the character proves a threat to the house, that's different. In order to secure loyalty, Lyrandar might offer a Wheel of Wind and Water for free, provided... Well, when you get around to an 8,000 gp expenditure, assassination probably IS cheaper. This is a good plot hook, and I can see Lyrandar doing it for a remarkable PC; your troubleshooter example is a good basis for a campaign. But I hardly see the house doing it for every foundling heir. I see it as more likely that the house would approach the character and say "Look. You either join us, or you stay out of sight. Or else." If he stays out of sight, no need for that hunted fugitive part. If he joins them, great. If he causes lots of trouble - well, then you can look to Thuranni. In the case of the Lhazaar heirs, Thuranni has a strong presence in the principalities and Thuranni itself is just a slightly more formalized and larger-scale version of the Lhazaar Storm Heirs - so Thuranni actually has a strong relationship with them, serving to deter Phiarlan action. I don't know about that. Rygar is fighting to try to get the Lhazaarites accepted into mainstream society as a major player, and most of the Lhazaar ambassadors are spending an awful lot of time denying accusations of piracy. But the ambassadors are denying the accusations of piracy to save face, not because they actually believe the pirates are in the wrong. It all comes back to the traditions the society is founded upon. Rygar himself might even want such a change, but it's a matter of how quickly change can be forced. In my opinion, such a dramatic action would not help Rygar - it would simply cause mutiny and dissent. He needs to find a way to work within his system to affect change - abandoning the system completely will only cause chaos. And I still think you underestimate the power of the united Lhazaar fleet, as they too have their ship's mages and magical heirlooms. Lyrandar might win, but it would certainly suffer heavy losses - not to mention having to reveal its strength to the Five Nations. Far better to catch pirates on the open seas, where they will not generate such an alliance. It is true that he might face the wrath of the Princes if he ever openly acknowledges a deal-making scheme with the scurvy Stormsuckers, but he doesn't have to ever openly acknowledge such a scheme. Ah, fair enough. But in your earlier example you said that he didn't have to commit ships, but had to publically support it. It's that public support that's the issue. All he has to do is to redirect Lhazaar attention long enough for the Lyrandars to chastise Prince Mika in a manner acceptable to a Bloodsail captain. Which would be "Catch her on the open seas." It's laying a blockade against the islands that is going to incur the wrath of the princes, and that's a harder thing to hide or to justify Rygar ignoring. Well, no. We would move from piracy to a non-war war, which I mentioned earlier. Terrorism only occurs in guerilla warfare style tactics, something that doesn't really happen on the open seas, and something that isn't really the thing for pirates to do. Thuranni and Phiarlan, yes, Lhazaar pirates, no. First, don't forget Thuranni's strong ties to the Principalities. If the princes chose to take such action, they would undoubtedly involve Thuranni. Second, you may underestimate the princes again; I did mention that they were land raiders as well as pirates (less frequently, mind you, since it's a more obvious act of war - but something they are quite capable of doing). Sneaking into a harbor and destroying ships strikes me as a terrorist action (in fact, one that has happened in recent memory) - and one that I could see the Gray Tide (one of the Principalities to be revealed in the next Dragonshard) cheerfully taking on. Again, catching Mika on the open seas and sinking her - all good. Declaring war on the Principalities themselves - very bad for business, if you ask me. All Lyrandar has to do is protect all their interests long enough to run the pirates dry, possibly even move ship routes. Eventually, the lack of incoming resources makes piracy impractical as a life occupation, and the Islanders will be forced to take up something else. It is worth noting that piracy is NOT the sole occupation and income of the Principalities. Check the ECS; during the age of Galifar, Lhazaar piracy was at a minimum, and the Lhazaar focused on trade and exploration (still fighting Serens and potentially Aereni, I suspect, but staying away from Galifar). It's a tradition; it's something they enjoy and are proud of; but their society won't collapse if they can't engage in piracy. This is also an important note: When the ECS lists the size of Lhazaar fleets, it's talking about elite vessels, not every ship they have available. The princes have a host of smaller ships, fishing vessels and the like. Lack of piracy options will frustrate the Lhazaar, but truth be told, with the war over, even now they are anticipating trouble. The ECS already notes that Rygar is using his ships for mercantile purposes. The Lhazaar are flexible folk: piracy is something they take joy in, but it is not the sole pillar of their society. If Lyrandar moves everything away, they would be quick to fill the mercantile void Lyrandar left behind; when Lyrandar returned, they could reconsider piracy. In a very real way, pirates exist because the resource owners allow them to. Certainly - because the cost of stopping them exceeds the losses inflicted. I don't think anyone's arguing that. The argument is the point at which these occur. Earlier, you seemed to be saying "Any single pirate attack against a Lyrandar ship." I still think that's excessive to actually go to war, though not necessarily to send hunters out on the sea. It may be a feature unique to Lhazaarites pirates, but almost no pirate ever considers anything "by the rules." I would certainly argue that it IS a feature unique to Lhazaar pirates. I think the issue here is that you have a very high opinion of Lyrandar and a very low opinion of the Lhazaar, who you are comparing to the pirates of our world. I'm saying that nothing like the Lhazaar has ever existed on our world. They are bound by Lhazaar's laws, and are not simply a chaotic mess; again, they've gone through centuries where mercantile activity and exploration (they recovered dragonshards from Q'barra long before it was settled) has been just as important as piracy (one more reason they actively dislike the Lyrandar, since it's virtually impossible for them to directly compete there), where their main opponents have been the Serens. We may or may not actually be in disagreement heer. Again, if they can defeat Mika on the seas, good for them. No man owns the seas. But come to the islands, and you are challenging the nation. But pirates are nothing if not practical and if taking on a Lyrandar Ship of the Line would be suicide, no pirate would cheer Mika on... Hmmm. I feel that I've said multiple times that they wouldn't attack the core fleet, and that Mika wouldn't attack something she felt she couldn't take, considering both long and short-term consequences. So why are we arguing about the ships of the line? Now, the issue becomes, "If they're so contentious, how can they possibly resist assimilation by conquest?" The answer is simple: they have a simple and straightforward rule that even they acknowledge. This might be banding together by religion, or by nation, but whatever it is, it really only triggers when a force is clearly bent on taking over the Isles. Indeed. But in my opinion, blockading the Isles would be seen as "close enough." And I still think you see them as more contentious than I do - which would be my fault, of course, since I wrote the recent dragonshard. A sea route through Q'barra would probably avoid most of the Lhazaar islands. Most, perhaps. But Lorghalen is right off the coast of Q'barra; especially if you plan to take the eastern path to Sarlona, it's hard to miss. My first instinct would be Mror gold. If Mror gold were somehow mined mostly on the edge of the continent, a case could be made for the perils of transporting the gold underground, where the Orcs or worse creatures could ambush undergound caravans. Lyrandar can offer transport by sea to the nearest port after which it gets transported by secure rail back to the main vaults of the Kundarak in the proximate cities. I don't know. Something about heavy gold-laden ships somehow appeals to me. I like it as well. It is worth noting that the Mror trade in other ores as well, so you have mithral, adamant, and so on. Sarlona routes do, of course, pass through the Principalities, but I get the impression that there really isn't much of that going on. And the question, of course, is which goods? Crysteel? Perfume? Actually, I think there's a fair bit at the moment. Textiles and silks, certainly. "Medicinal substances", which is to say, dreamlily. Spices. But the Riedrans are also offering considerable material support to the Five Nations to rebuild the shattered kingdoms; this could take many forms, from gold to true medicinal supplies to simple grain (not a great haul for a pirate, but there you are). More than this, any ship Mika brings far from home had better have 2 level 5 Clerics each for food and water, and possibly some target port nearby to berth. Certainly, or a magic item to accomplish the same task. Magic items last longer, and they've had thousands of years to develop what they need to accomplish their tasks. I wouldn't agree with the illusion deal. I wouldn't either, in Mika's case. I'll note that the Lhazaar articles were written months ago, and next week's addresses the Principality that would actually use such tactics. Fog is much more her speed. No. That's exactly the point. Unless the Lhazaars can match wind's favor ship for ship, they can't concentrate firepower the way independently powered ships can. And that's my point: They can. Mika may only have a battle fleet of six ships, but those ships ARE magically geared to the gills, and each can match wind's favor. The Lhazaar have their share of mundane ships which would be next to useless, but the personal fleets of the princes are carrying the magic items of their ancestors and the best warriors and spellcasters their culture has to offer. In sheer numbers, there's no way Mika could match the Lyrandar. She has six warships. But she could, if she chose (for some insane reason, since we're all in agreement that it would serve little useful purpose in comparison to the risk) bring those six ships to bear on a single Lyrandar ship of the line. And if Lyrandar lays siege to Krag, all the princes might bring in their fleets. Lyrandar STILL might outnumber them all - but again, it won't be a pretty fight by any means, and Lyrandar doesn't automatically have the edge. Lyrandar may be the greatest power on the seas, but the combined forces of the Lhazaar certainly exceed the might of any single modern national navy, in my opinion. But the Lhazaar have never had the urge to band together in offense as they have in defense. The navy of Galifar certainly overpowered them in resources alone - but never on a ship-to-ship basis. Now, coming back to "If Lhazaar has such great ships, how does Lyrandar maintain its power" – well, all the reasons you've already given. Just because Mika COULD potentially attack a ship of the line and get away with it doesn't mean she ever would; she's smart enough to think things through. But it means that a war against the Principalities would be a dangerous venture. 2. It may be possible to "prove" that there is no basis for piracy in Khorvaire. However, that is not the case. There are pirates in Khorvaire, and specifically, the most notorious of them reside in the Lhazaar Principlalities. There is no need to prove this. It's a given. The challenge is to figure out how such a thing is possible, and more than that, how such a thing can be so plausible as to be perfectly natural! That's exactly what I'd like to see. I agree completely that fantasy is better when it is also logical and realistic, and this has always been one of my goals with Eberron. But at the moment much of the weight of the argument had the feel of "the Lhazaar pirates couldn't exist" than "How could they exist?" Certainly this more recent discussion of possible cargoes and such goes a ways towards that. 3. I tend to discover that "mundane" reality has a quirky way of turning out to be a lot more colorful than anything the mind of man can possibly imagine. Following something to its logical conclusion gave us the colorful tapestry of Eberron. I don't intend to stop now. "Realistic grit" is the mainstay of many pulp novels, and by gar, I'm going to keep it that way! Please do! |
| Hellcow05-14-05, 02:18 PM | Unless the Lhazaars can match wind's favor ship for ship, they can't concentrate firepower the way independently powered ships can. This actually raises a far greater question about the nature of naval warfare in a magical world. You've already discussed a few of the relveant spells, such as warp wood (though the close range of this spell really makes it more of a last-ditch effort to repel would-be boarders as opposed to the first chouse of attack. . But going back to just fireball: we have a long range spell that can strike with perfect accuracy, and that is not fixed to a particular position on the ship. If you've got your magewright with an eternal wand of fireball, he can run along the deck to match the position of the enemy ship. So many of the usual challenges of sail-age combat - the relative facing of the two ships to determine the number of cannons that can be brought to bear and the available area of the target - aren't going to be an issue. If you're close enough - and haven't managed to kill my mage - you're a valid target. Now, not every ship will be capable of producing fireballs or lightning bolts, whether through mage or wand. But you could certainly expect a high-level warship to have this sort of capability. Which makes countermagic vital. If one fireball can destroy a ship, and can't be outmaneuvered, the only defenses are to be able to somehow survive the fireball or dispel it. Anyhow, I'd certainly be interested in hearing people's thoughts on the subject of naval warfare. |
| Blindside05-14-05, 05:09 PM | Anyhow, I'd certainly be interested in hearing people's thoughts on the subject of naval warfare. Magical naval warfare will evolve much like modern day naval warfare. Information on your enemy is worth more then any gun, crew, or magic. If you know they opposing ship has a mage, and your ship doesn't.. you must plan accordingly, and visa versa. Ships trying to engage in piracy, would simply have to know if they could take a ship or not. Actual mechanics would only come into play once the information about said ship was known. Lets take a look at a good example of this. Pirates of the Carribbean. After Turner saved Elizabeth the first time... They got aboard the Interceptor and tried to outrun them. Elizabeth thinking they had the fastest ship in the Sea, said to dump everything overboard. When Turner came out from below deck and seen the Pearl, he knew they could not outrun the Pearl. He had the knowledge that the Pearl was faster... and he stopped them from dumping the cannons. Not much magic involved in that, but it should show the point. If you know so and so mage rides with a crew... and you know his tactics. Then your mage will have the advantage, unless the other mage was smart enough to do his homework too. |
| Flame_Drake05-14-05, 11:44 PM | Magical naval warfare will evolve much like modern day naval warfare. Information on your enemy is worth more then any gun, crew, or magic. If you know they opposing ship has a mage, and your ship doesn't.. you must plan accordingly, and visa versa. Ships trying to engage in piracy, would simply have to know if they could take a ship or not. Actual mechanics would only come into play once the information about said ship was known. Lets take a look at a good example of this. Pirates of the Carribbean. After Turner saved Elizabeth the first time... They got aboard the Interceptor and tried to outrun them. Elizabeth thinking they had the fastest ship in the Sea, said to dump everything overboard. When Turner came out from below deck and seen the Pearl, he knew they could not outrun the Pearl. He had the knowledge that the Pearl was faster... and he stopped them from dumping the cannons. Not much magic involved in that, but it should show the point. If you know so and so mage rides with a crew... and you know his tactics. Then your mage will have the advantage, unless the other mage was smart enough to do his homework too. Which could lead to another of the Lhazaar, they can pick their targets and do their homework, but the target can't do homework on them. Drake |
| Roxlimn05-17-05, 10:56 AM | Hellcow: Only a brief post. Still compiling ideas. That's exactly what I'd like to see. I agree completely that fantasy is better when it is also logical and realistic, and this has always been one of my goals with Eberron. But at the moment much of the weight of the argument had the feel of "the Lhazaar pirates couldn't exist" than "How could they exist?" Certainly this more recent discussion of possible cargoes and such goes a ways towards that. Before we can speculate on how things might be, we must first be aware of the difficulties of their existence, as such important factors are likely to shape both form and function at all times. For example, the usual demographics of Eberron strongly argue for overwhelming magical force and numbers in favor of Lyrandar overall, as against the Lhazaars. That being the case, how can they prey on Lyrandar shipping? When you put the question that way, the answer becomes simple: Lyrandar is allowing the piracy to continue for some reason, probably, because they're merchants at heart, the cost of keeping the pirates down overweighs the losses they inflict. Possibly, they may be supporting the tradition of piracy for their own reasons. A secondary problem arises: why would they sacrifice their prestige for such cheap rewards? Prestige is something very expensive. It would certainly clearly outweigh the costs for Lyrandar to "discourage" piracy quite heavily. Again, the answer presents itself readily: they don'y sacrifice their prestige. They find some way (like getting the Windwright independents take the bullets) to preserve their prestige while keeping all their profits intact. Simple, and quite interesting, too. Likewise, the problem of what possible route the pirates might be preying on and how needs to be considered carefully before venturing anything heavy handed. Usually, just thinking things through sensibly yields better results than ruling things like fire-proof sails and such like. These concepts are easy enough to come up with, and are always there to fall back on, but surely, something better explanation must be out there. The "solution" posed is that the pirates range all across the continent, raiding pretty much wherever they go. This "solution" poses even more questions than it purports to solve. Why return to the Principalities in the first place? Why would any of the Five Nations tolerate raiding in their own backyards? Why would Lyrandar? No, it's much simpler to presume that most Lhazaars don't range too far off from the Principalities, and like most real world pirates, the prey comes to them - that there's some incomparable benefit to be had by passing through that particular area. |
| MavrickWeirdo05-17-05, 10:31 PM | So what would a "Pride of the Line" Lyrandar not-warship look like? I suspect it would be a "Kraken-Hunter" (Similar to a Whaler). This would give the ship a certain latitude to "arm" itself. If we take Whaling Ships as our guide, then the ship could be: 115 feet long x 30 feet wide x 15 feet deep, with 4 masts, and 4 longboats. It would have a crew of about 30 Captain (see page 91 RoE for a House Lyrander Captain, L5.) 1st mate (Member of House Lyrander with a least dragonmark, L3) 2nd Mate (Member of House Lyrander with no dragonmark, but high charisma, L3) 3rd Mate (Trusted non-family, PC class L3) <likely classes for the "mates" Artificer, Bard, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer) Boatheader<in charge of one of the longboats> (Expert Sailor L3) Cooper/Carpenter/Engineer (Magewright L2) Cook (Adept L2) Blacksmith/ Asst. Carpenter (Expert L2) Sailmaker (Expert L2) 1 Boatsteerer<Harpooner> (Warrior L2) 3 Boatsteerer<Harpooner> (Warrior L1) 2 Seamen (Commoner L4) 4 Seamen (Commoner L2) 10 Greenhands (Commoner L1) Cabin Boy (Commoner L1) The race of the crew would be, Half-Elf (Lyrander), Elf (Valenar), Gnome (Zilargo), Human (Audair or Brelander), or Half-Orc (Shadow Marsh). People they have strong ties with. |
| ryanroyce05-18-05, 05:21 PM | Hellcow: A secondary problem arises: why would they sacrifice their prestige for such cheap rewards? Prestige is something very expensive. It would certainly clearly outweigh the costs for Lyrandar to "discourage" piracy quite heavily. Again, the answer presents itself readily: they don'y sacrifice their prestige. They find some way (like getting the Windwright independents take the bullets) to preserve their prestige while keeping all their profits intact. Why would House Lyrandar care about prestige? A normal human merchant house on Earth with nothing to truly distinguish themselves from any other merchant house needs prestige as a selling point, sure, but House Lyrander doesn't have that problem. They have a tangible and absolute advantage over every other shipping company out there, so they don't need prestige to distinguish themselves from other merchants. They are the best because they can demonstratably prove that they are the best. Now, if there was a split in House Lyrandar as there was in House Phiarlan, then prestige would become much more important. As it is now, though, prestige is a badge of honor for the House that it values highly, but it is not important enough to them to sacrifice ships and sailors needlessly. Ryan |
| aelryinth05-18-05, 09:18 PM | I'm going to chime in on the economics of this situation...specifically, the transportation of mass goods. Transporting bulk is far cheaper by water then ANY other means of transportation, even in the current age. If you want to save money on cargo over distance, and its relatively straight, you go by boat, even if its slow. The idea behind rice falls flat because rice grew in Egypt...china didn't ship rice along the silk/spice road. The Dutch most assuredly DID ship spices and silk and porcelain on their merchantmen. They did so by cutting crews to a minimum, building great ships and having great charts. The trip still sucked because they had to go all the way around Africa. But even in the modern day, with access to trains, once the Suez canal was built, it meant the death of the Silk Road. Shipping is THAT much more efficent. Without a HUGE train infrastructure, shipping over any distance, even if it means 2-3 times the distance, is far cheaper. A ship moves 24/7, for the most part...a caravan 8 hours a day. It tends to move faster, and requires less in the way of supplies. With magic, it moves faster then even the best caravan, and that is VERY important. A ship moves even in bad weather that will mire a caravan for days. Wheat spoils when you get water on it, too. It doesn't and didn't stop it from being shipped in bulk. Any kind of bulk shipping is better done by ship. I suspect that most civilized nations will have a canal network for shipping bulk to centers of commerce (just like we did in early America) and then crude rails that are horse or ox-drawn hauling wagons to other locations (since they don't have steam power). But shipping is Da Bomb. It is the main reason that cities grow up on rivers...it's so much easier to move goods. Land shipping is no match. ==Aelryinth |
| Roxlimn05-18-05, 11:35 PM | Yes, if the trip was relatively straight. Khorvaire is a roundish continent with few major rivers up into major points of entry. You'd have to go far longer on practically any shipping route than you would if you chose to go a land route. Without a HUGE train infrastructure, shipping over any distance, even if it means 2-3 times the distance, is far cheaper. A ship moves 24/7, for the most part...a caravan 8 hours a day. It tends to move faster, and requires less in the way of supplies. With magic, it moves faster then even the best caravan, and that is VERY important. A ship moves even in bad weather that will mire a caravan for days. Modern, yes, Sail Age, even with magic, no. One of the key points of traveling by water is that your cargo is exposed to danger. Nations typically protect their interests on land, and if you're shipping across contiguous borders, then your cargo is almost 100% safe. Water is slightly more problematic. Provided that Lyrandar can protect its cargo 100% or near enough, it might stand a chance. What with all the pirates, the water threats and so on and so forth, it may not. For some routes, going by land is definitely doable, but for the most part, these routes will tend to go to ground long before they hit the Principalities. The problem isn't that water shipping isn't viable - it definitely is, especially for dangerous places like Q'barra and the Shadow Marshes to say nothing of Xen'drik, for which you need water based shipping. The problem is that I don't see very many reasons why most routes would go past the Principalities. There are several ways to resolve this, though, but that would go into Prey on the Open Seas part 2. I suspect that most civilized nations will have a canal network for shipping bulk to centers of commerce (just like we did in early America) and then crude rails that are horse or ox-drawn hauling wagons to other locations (since they don't have steam power). Depends. Levitate routes would work much better, and for major centers of commerce, I suspect Orien would go through the trouble of creating something like a minor railway. A Lightning Rail is not the same as normal rails, and nothing in the ECS suggests that the people of Khorvaire know anything about rails at all, steam powered or otherwise. For locations not reachable by rail, I think ox-drawn wagons would be next on the list. I think that Breland and Zilargo might have something along the lines of canals. The canal system of transporting goods was used throughout history, there are canals in Industrial Age America, as well as in Angkor Wat, Thailand, Malaysia, and other ancient cities and population centers, especially those that have access to poweful rivers. Breland seems best suited for this sort of activity because it has a mighty river, and presumably, many tributaries. Zilargo also seems suited, even though it doesn't have large rivers charted. The mountains along inside its border must be draining water some way, and if there are no major rivers involved, I suspect that there are many minor waterways in the region. Even so, there are inland routes and these compete with coastal routes for efficiency and profitability. The question here isn't really water-bound shipping vs. land shipping. It's coastal shipping vs. inland shipping, and that inland shipping includes any shipping done by water, too. A large and efficient canal system throughout the Five Nations argues strongly against Lyrandar coastal shipping, not for it, and despite my rather large store of suspension of disbelief and faith in making pirates work, I just don't see Lhazaar pirates coming in from the sea with rafts and shallow hulled boats to raid the inland canals of Khorvaire. It would be just too silly. The idea behind rice falls flat because rice grew in Egypt...china didn't ship rice along the silk/spice road. Wheat spoils when you get water on it, too. It doesn't and didn't stop it from being shipped in bulk. Any kind of bulk shipping is better done by ship. I don't know about wheat, but some kinds of cargo just aren't worth the risk of shipping. As late as the early Industrial Age, losing entire ships and fleets of cargo at sea was a major risk. We still lose tanksfull of oil and other precious cargo at sea for no discernable reason. Rice grew in China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as many other centers of population growth, but some areas grew them better than others, and mainland SEAsia among what are now Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam were some of the best places to grow rice in. Despite the obvious benefits, though, rice was not shipped by sea to China, or really much anywhere. A storm at sea could ruin your entire rice cargo, even without touching the ship. Heck, just the sea air could ruin it on a bad day. Wheat? Don't know. Rice? Don't think so. Rice was delivered along canal, routes, though. |
| Siran Dunmorgan05-19-05, 02:17 AM | I don't know about wheat, but some kinds of cargo just aren't worth the risk of shipping. As late as the early Industrial Age, losing entire ships and fleets of cargo at sea was a major risk. We still lose tanksfull of oil and other precious cargo at sea for no discernable reason. Rice grew in China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as many other centers of population growth, but some areas grew them better than others, and mainland SEAsia among what are now Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam were some of the best places to grow rice in. Despite the obvious benefits, though, rice was not shipped by sea to China, or really much anywhere. A storm at sea could ruin your entire rice cargo, even without touching the ship. Heck, just the sea air could ruin it on a bad day. Wheat? Don't know. Rice? Don't think so. Rice was delivered along canal, routes, though. *Deep sigh* China? Malaysia? Egypt? Irrelevant. Talk to me about Eberron. Are most of the major cities on Khorvaire built on waterways, or accessible by water? Yes, they are—because transportation by water is—or was, before the invention of the Lightning Rail—the most effective, cost-efficient means of moving bulk goods. All of those things we see being loaded or unloaded by those oh-so-clever 'energy cranes' in illustrations in Sharn: City of Towers are apparently being moved off of or onto the docks, i.e. to or from water transportation. Rice was the example I used because it's not commonly grown elsewhere than the Shadow Marches, it's not generally associated with any of the Five Nations—and because from a bulk shipment perspective, the Marches are accessible only by sea. It's the principal bulk cargo both originating in and bound for Khorvaire that no one has much of an option on shipping: it has to move by water. I could have used Riedran goods as another example—spices, exotic furs, glassware, and so on—to make a similar point, but these things are often profitable in less than high volume, which is not the case with rice. For what it's worth, rice also grows well over much of lowland Sarlona, though it's clearly a different variety than that found in the Shadow Marches: Riedran rice is shorter grained and higher in gluten; it's more easily formed into—for example—noodle dishes. Sarlonan rice is quite rare in Khorvaire: Riedran ships rarely have access to the magics necessary to keep such cargoes completely dry that Khorvairian cargo-masters take for granted, and the use of such arcane magic by Khorvairian ships in Riedran waters is... ahh... suspect, at best. —Siran Dunmorgan |
| Roxlimn05-19-05, 05:45 AM | Siran Dunmorgan: Are most of the major cities on Khorvaire built on waterways, or accessible by water? Yes, they are—because transportation by water is—or was, before the invention of the Lightning Rail—the most effective, cost-efficient means of moving bulk goods. All of those things we see being loaded or unloaded by those oh-so-clever 'energy cranes' in illustrations in Sharn: City of Towers are apparently being moved off of or onto the docks, i.e. to or from water transportation. Waterways? Yes. Coastal shipping? No. Only a very small portion of the cities in Khorvaire are accessible from the sea. Rice was the example I used because it's not commonly grown elsewhere than the Shadow Marches, it's not generally associated with any of the Five Nations—and because from a bulk shipment perspective, the Marches are accessible only by sea. It's the principal bulk cargo both originating in and bound for Khorvaire that no one has much of an option on shipping: it has to move by water. In that case, I don't see how it can be shipped at all, using the magic we're aware of. Isn't there a Lightning Rail going to the Shadow Marshes? I could have used Riedran goods as another example—spices, exotic furs, glassware, and so on—to make a similar point, but these things are often profitable in less than high volume, which is not the case with rice. You still need the volume to justify the long journey from Reidra. Intercontinental transport by sea simply isn't going to be cheap in the Age of Sail. You need the massive profit margins just to make your transport business profitable. For what it's worth, rice also grows well over much of lowland Sarlona, though it's clearly a different variety than that found in the Shadow Marches: Riedran rice is shorter grained and higher in gluten; it's more easily formed into—for example—noodle dishes. Sarlonan rice is quite rare in Khorvaire: Riedran ships rarely have access to the magics necessary to keep such cargoes completely dry that Khorvairian cargo-masters take for granted, and the use of such arcane magic by Khorvairian ships in Riedran waters is... ahh... suspect, at best. 1. Actually, the Riedrans have Psionics, and I can think of a few ways by which you can preserve dryness in cargo using psionics. Which magic spells did you consider in terms of keeping cargo dry? 2. Where do you get your description of Riedran rice? 3. Good point about the limitations on arcane magic. Dragonmarks would probably be more justifiable, though. Still, the trip would still take a good amount of time. You need something more high profit than rice to transport. Any rice from Riedra is liable to be so monstrously expensive that I don't see it as a viable product in Khorvaire. |
| Just another user05-19-05, 06:55 AM | 1. Actually, the Riedrans have Psionics, and I can think of a few ways by which you can preserve dryness in cargo using psionics. Which magic spells did you consider in terms of keeping cargo dry? Correction, the Inspired have psionic, and I suspect that they would consider beneath their dignity use their powers to such mundane task as preserve goods. A difference between Sarlona and Korvhaine is also the diffusion of magic or equivalent in everyday life, common Sarlonian don't see as mush psionic as Korvhainians see magic. |
| Neofish05-19-05, 08:42 AM | A large and efficient canal system throughout the Five Nations argues strongly against Lyrandar coastal shipping, not for it, and despite my rather large store of suspension of disbelief and faith in making pirates work, I just don't see Lhazaar pirates coming in from the sea with rafts and shallow hulled boats to raid the inland canals of Khorvaire. It would be just too silly. Why..? Vikings did just that, they used shallow river boats to move into the mainland and raid nearby settlements... Also, on the subject of keeping precious material dry, why not a bag of holding..? Just make it a box of hoding, i'm sure Lyrander could afford mulitple boxes of holding on a single ship for bulking valuable goods and ensuring thier preservation and safe delivery, this would also give secure Lyrander place as the head conglomerate shipping industry, who else could keep the majority of the rice or wheat clean and dry and enitre sea voyage. A box of holding would undoubtly attract pirates, not only for a magic item of such vaule, but also for the potential paydirt inside of it... |
| Siran Dunmorgan05-19-05, 09:46 AM | Waterways? Yes. Coastal shipping? No. Only a very small portion of the cities in Khorvaire are accessible from the sea. Curious... It looks to me like most of the major or capital cities are either directly on the sea or on fjord-like extensions of it. Many of them are explicitly described as being sea-trade centers. The only capitals not on at least navigable rivers appear to be the Demon Wastes, Droaam, and the Eldeen Reaches. In that case, I don't see how it can be shipped at all, using the magic we're aware of. Isn't there a Lightning Rail going to the Shadow Marshes? No, there isn't. Not even close. The Eberron Campaign Setting explicitly describes all major traffic in and out of the Marches as travelling by sea. You still need the volume to justify the long journey from Reidra. Intercontinental transport by sea simply isn't going to be cheap in the Age of Sail. You need the massive profit margins just to make your transport business profitable. 1. Actually, the Riedrans have Psionics, and I can think of a few ways by which you can preserve dryness in cargo using psionics. Which magic spells did you consider in terms of keeping cargo dry? 2. Where do you get your description of Riedran rice? 3. Good point about the limitations on arcane magic. Dragonmarks would probably be more justifiable, though. Still, the trip would still take a good amount of time. You need something more high profit than rice to transport. Any rice from Riedra is liable to be so monstrously expensive that I don't see it as a viable product in Khorvaire. 1. Magics that can be used to keep cargoes dry include purify food and drink, the pre-3rd Edition spells destroy water, lower water, and part water, innovative uses of unseen servant, and the use of the magecraft spell in the construction of the ship itself, i.e., a masterwork ship tends not to leak. Not to mention the occasional control of the weather. Those are just the ones that spring immediately to mind. The various creation spells can also be used to great effect in waterproofing a seagoing vessel and its fittings, including hatch covers. Then there's the possibility that someone developed a spell or wondrous item specifically for the purpose of keeping things dry or preserved, something obvious, but not mentioned in the Dungeon Master's Guide—you'll notice that the various supplements, sourcebooks, and adventures constantly mention things that aren't in the core rulebooks. 2. I made it up. I made up the rice trade out of the Shadow Marches, too. Actually, I made up the whole concept of rice on Eberron, as far as I know. :) 3. I agree. That's why I characterized Sarlonan rice as 'quite rare' on Khorvaire. —Siran Dunmorgan |
| Roxlimn05-21-05, 10:09 AM | Important Update!!! New Dragonshard dealing with the Lhazaars! Tres cool content. :D Correction, the Inspired have psionic, and I suspect that they would consider beneath their dignity use their powers to such mundane task as preserve goods. A difference between Sarlona and Korvhaine is also the diffusion of magic or equivalent in everyday life, common Sarlonian don't see as mush psionic as Korvhainians see magic. We don't know the extent and to what uses the Inspired use Psionics in Sarlona. These details are presumably up to the DM. Why..? Vikings did just that, they used shallow river boats to move into the mainland and raid nearby settlements... Their depradations were dependent on the weak nature of the tribes in and around the European continent up to about the time of the First Crusades. Their power declined signifcantly with the rise of powerful nations. Also, on the subject of keeping precious material dry, why not a bag of holding..? Just make it a box of hoding, i'm sure Lyrander could afford mulitple boxes of holding on a single ship for bulking valuable goods and ensuring thier preservation and safe delivery, this would also give secure Lyrander place as the head conglomerate shipping industry, who else could keep the majority of the rice or wheat clean and dry and enitre sea voyage. Unfortunately, one of the main purposes of sea travel is to move things in bulk efficiently. If you had a Vault of Holding anyway (and this is actually already an item in Khorvaire), you'd better send it by rail - much faster that way. Curious... It looks to me like most of the major or capital cities are either directly on the sea or on fjord-like extensions of it. Many of them are explicitly described as being sea-trade centers. The only capitals not on at least navigable rivers appear to be the Demon Wastes, Droaam, and the Eldeen Reaches. Navigable rivers decrease sea traffic, not increase it. If you could send it up or down a river anyway, why send it by sea? Especially true in conjunction with rail and similar conveniences. Even if you had two coastal cities, if you had rivers and canals between them anyway, chances are, you'd do better with the rivers and canals. Here is a list of settlements (nonLhazaar) that are on the coast: Stormhome Merylsward (maybe) Urthhold Vralkek Sharn Adderport Newthrone Pitchwall Aerie Pylas Maradal Wyvernskull Thurimbar Trolanport Torch Keep Flint Keep Moonwatch Shaarat Kol Shadowlock Keep Here is a partial list of notable settlements not on the coast: Lakeside Krona Peak Irontown Frostmantle Thaliost Rekkenmark Korth Flamekeep Daskaran Atur Karrlakton Vedykar Vulyar Varna Passage Xandrar Erlaskar Cragwar Sylbaran Greenhart Starilaskur There are simply more inland settlements than there are coastal settlements - this is unavoidable in a more or less roundish continent. Let's say you want to transport grain from Aundair to Karrnath - a typical shipping route - something shippable like wheat. Your major centers of trade and transport are Fairhaven and Passage. Best to transport it down the line to Thaliost, thence by water to Atur. You can then distribute it as you like. Likewise, let's say you want to transport anything from Aundair to Breland. They share a direct border and rail between them. Even if you do something as hopelessly pathetic as transport it by caravan down the major trade routes, you'd still save thousands and thousands of miles of journeying by sea, and the possible disasters that can befall your cargo on that journey. A sea lane from Aundair to Breland simply isn't sane. Don't mistake me, there are viable sea lanes in Khorvaire. For example, many of the trade routes in Breland are connected to Sharn and many of the Zil settlements are near the sea. Darguun's to the west. On top of that, there's the Howling Peaks directly north and the Seawall Mountains to the east, as well as the King's Forest and Zil forests to the west. Clearly, if your cargo is anywhere east of Woodhelm, it's best to send it by water down to Sharn and thence to the Zil ports by coastal shipping. Even if your cargo is in Starilaskur, it might still be best to send it by rail down to Sharn and then by sea, if only to avoid Darguun raiders. Trading with Valenar and Q'barra also strike me as prime targets for sea shipping. Clearly, something important is available in those areas, and they may trade principally by sea, due to lack of trade roads and rail. No, there isn't. Not even close. The Eberron Campaign Setting explicitly describes all major traffic in and out of the Marches as travelling by sea. Yes. My ECS is not with me, so I cannot confirm. That's one of my major problems developing posts to this thread currently. Dragonshard sea shipping off the coasts of the Shadow Marches certainly argues strongly for piratical activity in that area, assuming that the pirates can get all the way there in the first place. 1. Magics that can be used to keep cargoes dry include purify food and drink, the pre-3rd Edition spells destroy water, lower water, and part water, innovative uses of unseen servant, and the use of the magecraft spell in the construction of the ship itself, i.e., a masterwork ship tends not to leak. Not to mention the occasional control of the weather. Those are just the ones that spring immediately to mind. Purify food and drink is a magical effect; this cuts severely into profits because of the cost per volume. It's just not going to happen. Pre-edition effects aren't exactly kosher at the moment. Unseeen Servant can't do complicated chores that are impossible for human servants. Magecraft only provides a bonus to the check. Besides, the leak isn't the problem. It's the sea air. Weather control again makes the transport very expensive. Rice just isn't worth it. The various creation spells can also be used to great effect in waterproofing a seagoing vessel and its fittings, including hatch covers. Then there's the possibility that someone developed a spell or wondrous item specifically for the purpose of keeping things dry or preserved, something obvious, but not mentioned in the Dungeon Master's Guide—you'll notice that the various supplements, sourcebooks, and adventures constantly mention things that aren't in the core rulebooks. There are - climate controlled carriages mentioned in City of Towers (IIRC). Also, Voliminous Vaults. These argue strongly for Lightning Rail shipping, not sea shipping. Moreover, speculative mentions of things like this don't exactly help. I can speculate about a rice strain that grows on rocks that makes rice the staple food all over Khorvaire, but that's just silly. 2. I made it up. I made up the rice trade out of the Shadow Marches, too. Actually, I made up the whole concept of rice on Eberron, as far as I know. The question of rice in the Shadow Marshes is questionable to begin with. Marshes typically have bad water and have variable water tables changing with the tides. This makes growing rice very problematic on many levels. Let's assume that rice is growable to begin with. Much of the land is wild and monster infested, there can't be that much rice - rice needs a lot of areas and sophisticated architecture and engineering to grow. Angkor Wat exported rice by caravan and canal, but that city is a paradigm of ancient sophistication. This means that even if rice were produced and exported, it probably isn't exported in any large amount, probably something you could export by foot, not by sea. If I had to make a guess about a land best for growing rice, I would guess possibly Aundair or Breland. 3. I agree. That's why I characterized Sarlonan rice as 'quite rare' on Khorvaire. More like completely unsaleable, really. |
| Just another user05-21-05, 11:03 AM | Important Update!!! New Dragonshard dealing with the Lhazaars! Tres cool content. :D We don't know the extent and to what uses the Inspired use Psionics in Sarlona. These details are presumably up to the DM. The inspired don't strike me as kind of people that care about the well being or commodity of their subjects (to not mention favor trade with foreign countries). If there would be a serious risk of famine maybe they could use their powers to preserve food, else why should they care? They are not cooks or merchants. They are the Inspired and have more important things to do. About the prevalence of sea routes over land route did you considered that the lightining rail is relatively recent and that beside all the other factors the presence of people that can control winds would put weight in favor of sea trading over ground trading? |
| Roxlimn05-21-05, 12:47 PM | The inspired don't strike me as kind of people that care about the well being or commodity of their subjects (to not mention favor trade with foreign countries). If there would be a serious risk of famine maybe they could use their powers to preserve food, else why should they care? They are not cooks or merchants. They are the Inspired and have more important things to do. 1. The Inspired brought about a golden age of peace, unity, and prosperity to Sarlona. Whether or not they genuinely care for the well being of Sarlonans is irrelevant. They would concern about things like food and the storage of it. Whether this concern reflects altruistic goals or not is beside the point. 2. The Inspired are on a long-term plot to remake Khorvaire into an image of Sarlona. Trade and diplomacy are their primary tools now, so they demonstrably would not only care for but encourage trade. About the prevalence of sea routes over land route did you considered that the lightining rail is relatively recent and that beside all the other factors the presence of people that can control winds would put weight in favor of sea trading over ground trading? 1. The Lightning Rail was made by the order of Galifar so it's more than a hundred years old. Even if the trade situation were different prior to the Lightning Rail, there has been more than enough time to change all that. 2. The influence of Lyrandar and their Dragonmarks are always foremost in my mind. Hellcow might even think I have Lyrandar on the brain to be talking about them on a thread about the Lhazaars. Having some select vessels using wind's favor can alleviate the vast advantage land shipping has in Khorvaire by virtue of distance, but the fact remains that for most Windwright ships, wind's favor simply isn't an option. Moreover, you can use wind's favor whether you're on a river craft or on a seaborne ship. There are lots of waterways in Khorvaire, supplemented by a solid network of trade roads and rail. Quite frankly, I'm having a lot of trouble trying to determine which goods are better shipped by sea and where. |
| Hellcow05-21-05, 11:57 PM | 1. The Inspired brought about a golden age of peace, unity, and prosperity to Sarlona. Whether or not they genuinely care for the well being of Sarlonans is irrelevant. They would concern about things like food and the storage of it. Whether this concern reflects altruistic goals or not is beside the point. I couldn't agree more. One thing I will quickly point out is that the list of coastal settlements - or land settlements - is by no means complete. The maps list the most important locations and a handful of others, but you can assume that there are many more hamlets and thorps scattered around major cities - thus, you can say "You pass through the little hamlet of Raven's Rush" without someone saying "But there IS no Raven's Rush!" (Ask that smart-alec player just how many ranks he has in Knowledge:geography...) This change isn't significant enough to affect the point being made, but I just wanted to clarify that there are other communities out there, albeit small ones. |
| gaerfindel05-23-05, 12:54 PM | There's the possibility that someone developed a spell or wondrous item specifically for the purpose of keeping things dry or preserved, something obvious, but not mentioned in the Dungeon Master's Guide—you'll notice that the various supplements, sourcebooks, and adventures constantly mention things that aren't in the core rulebooks.The Windwright Guildmaster looks over the Sea Spray. She turns to the captain, "What's with all the extra sconces in the hold, Jaelira? You don't need to see that well below, do you? Y'gone blind starin' at the Sun too long, have ya?" The Zil's tone is light and friendly, but more than just a little curious. After all, it is her job to see that all registered ships kept up to code. "Nar," the Lhazaarite responds. "Spellcandles. Keeps th' cargo drier than a flamin' priest on Tira's birthday. Cheaper'n paying some 'marked half-pint her weight in gold plus quarters on ship, too." Flushing at what she just said, the captain apologizes, "Nar meanin' to insult yerself, then, Master gnome." "No insult taken, Jaelira. And I commend you on your ingenuity. Long someone makes sure the ship doesn't burn down, I don't think this...'modification' is worthy of note. 'Course," she added with a look of mischief on her face, "it might be an idea the other captains might find usefull..." "Well, that'd nar be needin' doin', now would it now? I'm fer thinkin' the salt air's pickled yer wits some. Here" the captain said, handing the Guildmaster a few obviously antique coin worth far more than their face value. "Get yerself a drink o' that spiced water yer always goin' on about." |
| Siran Dunmorgan05-23-05, 05:06 PM | Ed.: [various points] Okay... first off, don't make me cite real-world history. I'm trying to do this solely with reference to Eberron. Suffice it to say that there is ample precedent (http://www.ricehope.com/history/RiceHistory.htm) in worlds other than Eberron for a profitable seaborne rice trade in an Age of Sail, and that it may even be profitable to seize such a cargo (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129686/). I'm happy to back off on the notion of rice originating in the Shadow Marches, even to suggesting that it was brought to the Marches by the more recent (c. 1000 years ago) wave of settlers from Sarlona, rather than originated by the orcs, though I still hold that the Marches are a pretty good place to find cultivated rice, and that it has as much of a place in Marches cuisine as does spicy barbecue[1]. What I'm actually trying to do is start from the assumption that there are pirates in the Principalities, and then back-fit to determine why and how, so we can forward-fit adventures and situations to them. Taking our inspiration from ECS 7:187, we read "Note: Most ships prefer to take the longer eastern route rather than run the risk of running aground in the Demon Wastes, the Shadow Marches, or Droaam." This is the basis of the intracontinental shipping that passes through the Principalities. So we can take it as read that there is a lot of shipping that passes through this area. There may be even more shpping that uses the inland waterways, rail, and caravan routes, but there's enough to make occasional piracy worthwhile. Now that we've established that there is trade through the principalities, we try to determine what cargoes would be carried this way. My assertion is that rice would be one of the prime suspects, because it's already on ships when it leaves the Shadow Marches, and it's only profitable in bulk.[2] You make good points about keeping it dry—but there are solutions to this problem that can be transparent to the adventure, just like no one concerns themselves with what's actually in all those conduits that you see running the length of a ship in a modern action movie, or in all of those cheap wooden crates found on the deck of every ship in every pirate film made. In Eberron, we can assume that they're filled with the little doohickeys that sailors use to keep the cargo dry. —Siran Dunmorgan P.S. Gaerfindel—very good! :clap: I can imagine this scene being played out with every ship that comes through the harbor—and our little Zil friend collecting his coin from every one of them. [1] I strongly suspect that Mr. Baker has Louisiana at least partially in mind when he writes of the Marches. The 'spicy barbecue' references in Sharn: City of Towers may be a reference to cajun cuisine, in which rice dishes also figure prominently. [2] Except Sarlonan rice. Again referring to Sharn: City of Towers, we know that there are high-class restaurants in Sharn that serve 'exotic' Riedran cuisine. Assuming that rice is a part of the Riedran (and remember, we're talking Riedran, not necessarily Inspired) cuisine, they would have a limited amount of Riedran rice on hand; for this purpose, it's likely that they would pay premium prices for any Riedran rice they could get, even to the point of making it profitable to bring only a hundred or so pounds of it across at a time. |
| gaerfindel05-23-05, 07:48 PM | Okay... first off, don't make me cite real-world history. I'm trying to do this solely with reference to Eberron. [snip] I still hold that the Marches are a pretty good place to find cultivated rice, and that it has as much of a place in Marches cuisine as does spicy barbecue[1]. [1] I strongly suspect that Mr. Baker has Louisiana at least partially in mind when he writes of the Marches. The 'spicy barbecue' references in Sharn: City of Towers may be a reference to cajun cuisine, in which rice dishes also figure prominently.Yeah, when I read 'spicy barbeque' (how do you spell it? :P) I also thought 'Cajun'. Great minds think alike! Taking our inspiration from ECS 7:187, we read "Note: Most ships prefer to take the longer eastern route rather than run the risk of running aground in the Demon Wastes, the Shadow Marches, or Droaam."I was wondering when someone else was going to notice that. :) P.S. Gaerfindel—very good! :clap: I can imagine this scene being played out with every ship that comes through the harbor—and our little Zil friend collecting his coin from every one of them.Thanks. IIRC(1), spellcandles were featured in Complete Divine -- and prolly Warriars of Faith before the 3.5 conversion -- and required an Alchemy check and/or Brew Potion feat to manufacture. Advantage, they last longer & are easier to 'cast' than the spell they emulate; just light the candle! (I imagine that purify food/drink spellcandles wood smell quite sweet; citrusy with a hint of cinnamon or sandlewood. :lights scented candle: ) (1) Can someone please verify this for me? I currently lack any of the Complete X books. :banghead: |
| Roxlimn05-25-05, 05:12 AM | Siran Dunmorgan: Okay... first off, don't make me cite real-world history. I'm trying to do this solely with reference to Eberron. Suffice it to say that there is ample precedent in worlds other than Eberron for a profitable seaborne rice trade in an Age of Sail, and that it may even be profitable to seize such a cargo. I am trying to do this in reference to Eberron and D&D. By my estimates, it would take a wind-favored ship about 75 or so days of travel in fair weather to reach the middle of the Lhazaar Principalities from off the coast of Trolanport. Accounting for cross-wind travel and tacking against unfavorable winds, as well as making port elsewhere and gales or storms, it would take a normal ship anywhere from 4-6 months to make the journey from Sharn to Port Krez. Even if you were able to keep the rice dry by polishing it prior to transport, rice simply doesn't last that long. It would crumble to powder long before you made port, this at least is true of the Indica and the Japonica varieties. By my estimates, it would take considerably less time to use the Lightning Rail, and it would make much more sense - since you'll actually arrive at your target market in time to sell something. I'm happy to back off on the notion of rice originating in the Shadow Marches, even to suggesting that it was brought to the Marches by the more recent (c. 1000 years ago) wave of settlers from Sarlona, rather than originated by the orcs, though I still hold that the Marches are a pretty good place to find cultivated rice, and that it has as much of a place in Marches cuisine as does spicy barbecue[1]. Rice culture is possible. Rice export is more prolematic. Let's assume for a moment that it is. On the basis of proximity, the most probably market for this is Breland, and even there, it would probably be an exotic and unreliable import. The only way you could make it to Aundair would be by Rail. What I'm actually trying to do is start from the assumption that there are pirates in the Principalities, and then back-fit to determine why and how, so we can forward-fit adventures and situations to them. Same here. There are products other than rice, you know. Stuff that's worth loads of gold and doesn't spoil. Things like Dragonshards, gold, and various metals. Taking our inspiration from ECS 7:187, we read "Note: Most ships prefer to take the longer eastern route rather than run the risk of running aground in the Demon Wastes, the Shadow Marches, or Droaam." This is the basis of the intracontinental shipping that passes through the Principalities. You're assuming that it's a sensible thing to do at all. This is by no means a given. Unless there is some pressing reason to do so, it's better to take the land/inland waterways route through the nations. For example, it's acceptable for sea shipping to exist for Zilargo-Breland, and general Q'barran trade. An Aundair-Breland route is nothing short of utterly insane. So we can take it as read that there is a lot of shipping that passes through this area. There may be even more shpping that uses the inland waterways, rail, and caravan routes, but there's enough to make occasional piracy worthwhile. Yes, that is the assumption. The question now is: "What do those ships contain?" My assertion is that rice would be one of the prime suspects, because it's already on ships when it leaves the Shadow Marches, and it's only profitable in bulk.[2] Not at all. Some rice is profitable, even in small amounts. Basmati rice is hideously expensive, but it is bought and sold. Some rice, like the red rice from the Mountain Provinces of the Philippines, doesn't even make it to the sea. Even if it's in ships when it leaves from the Marches, it would still be much better to land at Sharn and go by caravan and rail from there. Rice is just too fragile to survive a sea journey lasting for the better portion of a year. You make good points about keeping it dry—but there are solutions to this problem that can be transparent to the adventure, just like no one concerns themselves with what's actually in all those conduits that you see running the length of a ship in a modern action movie, or in all of those cheap wooden crates found on the deck of every ship in every pirate film made. In Eberron, we can assume that they're filled with the little doohickeys that sailors use to keep the cargo dry. What's wrong with saying that rice simply isn't transported through the Principalities? Hellcow: I suspected that the sealanes were too lengthy for Prince Mika to raid ships off the coast of Sharn. By my calculations, it would take Mika's wind favored ships 75 days to cross from Port Krez to somwhere off the city of Trolanport. Assuming she takes her normal ships along, this could be as long as 5 months. Then she needs another 5 months to journey back to Port Krez, just so that the people there don't forget who's in charge. Assuming that she can manage her cargo holds enough to allow her to keep 'em regularly full until she can fence off the cargo, she'll have about 2 months worth time of real raiding in each year, if she wants to prey off of Zil shipping. This assumes that she can use the local smugglers and secretly allied ports to caulk her ships and unload and fence stolen cargo. It's unreal. In contrast, if she simply preys off ships coming near Q'barra en route through the Principalities, she can be raiding or looking for prey for most of the year, and she can actually be in Port Krez often enough so that she doesn't have to pay a Changeling to pose as her just to remind people what she looks like. garfindel: I'm thinking they'll be cutting into the profits, as well. Why not transport something that doesn't require such maintenance? |
| The Dreaming Duck05-25-05, 01:46 PM | I am trying to do this in reference to Eberron and D&D. By my estimates, it would take a wind-favored ship about 75 or so days of travel in fair weather to reach the middle of the Lhazaar Principalities from off the coast of Trolanport. Accounting for cross-wind travel and tacking against unfavorable winds, as well as making port elsewhere and gales or storms, it would take a normal ship anywhere from 4-6 months to make the journey from Sharn to Port Krez. How are you making these calculations? D&D rules give a flat rate of travel for ships. They say nothing about worrying about cross-winds: instead, they say that a wind-favored ship can move faster than a mundane ship, implying that the speed given for a mundane ship takes the possibility of poor wind into account. By my calculations, a sea voyage from Sharn to Regalport covers about 5,000 miles. This results in the following travel times, based on the ship speeds given in the PHB and ECS: Elemental galleon 10.4 days Soarwood galley, Lyrandar captain 17 days Soarwood galley 26 days Mundane galley, Lyrandar captain 34 days Mundane Galley 52 days If it is possible to create an elemental galleon out of soarwood that can benefit from the speed-increasing effect of soarwood, such a vessel would be able to make the trip in 5.2 days. Whether this is possible is unclear. Page 127 of the ECS says that soarwood already is a component of elemental vessels; the question is if it is used in the same quantities as a normal soarwood ship, or whether one can use more to gain the enhanced speed. In any case, it might take a normal ship almost two months - and that's Eberron's 28-day months - to go from Sharn to Regalport. But four to six? It looks like we're plotting different courses. And while the rice trade isn't my primary concern, personal experience with the rice sitting on my kitchen counter is that it can last for more than two months (for that matter, I think I have had rice sitting in a glass jar on the counter for two years now), making transport by soarwood galley certainly viable. |
| Roxlimn06-04-05, 10:58 AM | A Galley isn't a normal ship. As I said before, Galleys of the type given in the PHB would most likely be flagships, and almost always will stick mostly to the coast, possibly of a tri-hull design with a relatively low waterline clearance. The "normal ship" would most probably be "Sailing Ship" which has a daily sail rate of 48 miles. Even if we assume that this takes inclement winds into consideration (and there's nothing to say either way), this means that for most ships, the trip from Sharn to Regalport will take over 100 days nonstop, or about 3 months and 1 and 1/2 weeks. If it takes the time to make port, avoid storms, and other such normal activity, 4 to 6 months is completely reasonable. Edit: to be perfectly fair, the smaller ships are generally the faster ones, and also tended to be more seaworthy. Clinker built Viking and Visayan longships traveled the world's seas and could reach top speeds of 20 knots or more, both on the row and on sail. Caravels tended to average 90 to 100 miles to the day (at about 4.6 mph), with 200 being quite phenomenal. Longships supposedly could maintain speeds of up to 12 mph over long distances. |
| aelryinth06-04-05, 03:11 PM | You are all forgetting one other factor about shipping, per se. There's only one form of fast cargo shipping overland, and that is the lightning rail. Exactly how many lightning rails are there? Uh huh. How much can they ship at once? The same amount as your average galleon? Maybe twice as much? And exactly how much are you going to pay for use of this monopolistic enterprise? And then ask yourself how many ships are out there. There isn't a massive lightning rail infrastructure in Eberron...there's only the main lines. In our modern society, there's train tracks all over the place, and they transport thousands of tons of stuff all at once...and its still cheaper, for long hauls, to use water. Half the cost or less, I believe. Wind Power being free makes a huge difference. Hellcow and the ECS repeatedly make the inference that using the Lightning Rail is not cheap. Orien has a monopoly, they are profiting from it, and they have neither a massive amount of Rails nor competition to keep the price down. If speed is not your issue, then shipping is indeed the way to go. Piracy being a problem isn't going to be. Piracy is a profit based business like any other. Pirating ships with drab bulk cargo is a waste of time...there's no money involved. Piracy's heyday on Earth was the Spanish looting of South America, and unbelievable amounts of gold. Pirates didn't raid coal ships. Likewise, if pirates start going after every ship, the merchants and lords who own them are going to seriously start going after the pirates. The pirates have to weigh vengeance against greed, and arrive at an equilibrium. Taking cargoes and leaving the ships and crew alive is annoying but a cost of doing business...taking all three is taking a lot more money and now it becomes cheaper to remove the pirates in toto. ==Aelryinth |
| Sarlax06-04-05, 04:23 PM | Hellcow and the ECS repeatedly make the inference that using the Lightning Rail is not cheap. Orien has a monopoly, they are profiting from it, and they have neither a massive amount of Rails nor competition to keep the price down. The rail is incredibly expensive at 5 SP per mile (ECS 121). It's 2371 miles from Sharn to Flamekeep (from the lightning rail segments listed on the official map). That's 1185.5 GP for a one-way trip for one person. Who knows how much is costs to ship goods? |
| The Dreaming Duck06-04-05, 10:53 PM | Caravels tended to average 90 to 100 miles to the day (at about 4.6 mph), with 200 being quite phenomenal. Longships supposedly could maintain speeds of up to 12 mph over long distances. Well, add to that soarwood - which is known to double ship speed. Not standard issue, certainly, but my point is that a Regalport-Sharn route may not BE a standard route; only ships that can make the journey in an economically useful manner would bother. As I said before, Galleys of the type given in the PHB would most likely be flagships... See, here's where I'm going back to what I took to be your original vision of Lyrandar. This is a world where magic-enhanced medieval technology has taken the place of modern technological development, and where we have what amount to multinational corporations. Lyrandar has been around for centuries. So, in OUR history, the idea of trade galleys may seem unlikely; these would be the rare ships. In Eberron, they're the oil tankers and Lyrandar is Exxon. To begin with, elemental galleons are described as "huge galleys" - so clearly they make use of galleys for trade. And a mundane galley is less than half the cost of an elemental galleon. Now, it's valid to ask whether two galleys are worth one elemental galleon, but nonetheless, Lyrandar clearly has the resources to produce a fleet of galleys if it wants to (though they might be cargo vessels of similar design as opposed to warships). Frankly, I'd expect Eberron to have NEW ship types reflecting Zil/Lyrandar advances; perhaps we'll see some in The Explorer's Handbook. |
| Roxlimn06-05-05, 01:39 AM | aelryinth: In point of fact, we don't know how many lightning rail trains there are, but they are supposedly a major form of shipping in and around Khorvaire. Also, fast inland shipping is not limited to the lightning rail. Rafts, floats, barges and the like ply the extensive inland waterways in Khorvaire. Even assuming a mere 2 mile per hour speed in between major waterways, and no more than a few canals not detailed in the overland map, inland shipping is by far the most sensible way to go, unless you have some dire reasons why this is not doable. And exactly how much are you going to pay for use of this monopolistic enterprise? Maritime and inland shipping are both monopolies. And then ask yourself how many ships are out there. Not that many. Maritime shipping even in the Age of Sail was puny compared to what we ship now. Even if Khorvairian rail transported no more than 10% of what today's rails do, they would still be larger than a comparative Age of Sail martime industry. Piracy being a problem isn't going to be. Piracy is a profit based business like any other. Pirating ships with drab bulk cargo is a waste of time...there's no money involved. Piracy's heyday on Earth was the Spanish looting of South America, and unbelievable amounts of gold. Pirates didn't raid coal ships. That would be incorrect. Piracy's heyday in the European mindset would be Galleon Trade Carribean piracy sometime in the 17th century. The Spanish Galleon trade that passed through the Carribean carried the entire year's budget not only of their South American colonies, but also their very profitable Moluccan Island interests, as well as trade with China. All that money in a couple Galleons - gross proceeds for an entire year's worth of trading! Even so, one of the reasons the Spanish took the trouble to ship across the treacherous Pacific and brave the Elizabethan Sea Dogs was to avoid the even deadlier and cannier Celebes Sea pirates hailing from Borneo, Sulu, and some of the Visayan islands. These pirate/raider/merchants have raided mainland Asian shipping for centuries, and they continue to do so to this day. They were also not averse to crossing over to China to raid coastal villages on a seasonal basis, bringing back booty and slaves. When they weren't raiding or exacting "toll", they were conducting trade for local island spices, delicacies, and specialties, often with the very merchants they "tolled" for use of "their sealanes". These pirates tended to raid only the most profitable ships, and as with the current pirates, only the hardier cargo and the most saleable ones. Rice is saleable, but it doesn't keep well, and it gets easily damaged, so attacking a Rice-bearing ship can all too often get you absolutely nothing. Also, rice tends to have very very low cost per bulk, so you wouldn't want to be raiding Indica rice or even Jasmine rice from Thailand. Basmati rice or Banaue blood rice, now those are worth stealing. Sarlax: The rail trade is a monopoly, so we can't really tell from cost per person what the cost per bulk of goods will be. Indeed, Orien might charge differently depending on the cargo, even if it doesn't involve any additional effort on their part. That's what being a monopoly entails. The Dreaming Duck: If we are to presume that Caravels will travel an average of 90 to 100 miles to the day in Eberron, then we must junk the PHB overland waterspeeds altogether (not a bad idea) and come up with our own estimates for overland water speed based on accounts and testing. See, here's where I'm going back to what I took to be your original vision of Lyrandar. This is a world where magic-enhanced medieval technology has taken the place of modern technological development, and where we have what amount to multinational corporations. Lyrandar has been around for centuries. So, in OUR history, the idea of trade galleys may seem unlikely; these would be the rare ships. In Eberron, they're the oil tankers and Lyrandar is Exxon. To begin with, elemental galleons are described as "huge galleys" - so clearly they make use of galleys for trade. And a mundane galley is less than half the cost of an elemental galleon. Now, it's valid to ask whether two galleys are worth one elemental galleon, but nonetheless, Lyrandar clearly has the resources to produce a fleet of galleys if it wants to (though they might be cargo vessels of similar design as opposed to warships). Now see, that's the problem. The bulk of maritime shipping in Eberron isn't Lyrandar itself, but is controlled and taxed by Lyrandar through the Windwright Guild. Even if Lyrandar could afford it, why bother? Just tax those people who ship the goods and never worry about anything anymore. For small merchants and even middling size merchants, a versatile ship of shallow draught capable of both sea and upriver travel would be best, as it would allow them versatility, range, and durability. It would have to be smallish because their budgets are limited, and because smaller vessels tend to be faster. While Lyrandar may very well be sending large shipments over by Galley and Elemental Galleon, the bulk of maritime shipping would still be done by the average merchantman - a smallish ship with 3-4 masts highly resembling a Carrack or a Caravel. I've been trying to come up with speculative ship types based on magic development and the crafting technique we know is possible with things like Mend, Make Whole, and Fabricate. Please feel free to make your own contributions. |
| Korhal_IV06-05-05, 02:08 AM | On the use of Fireball in Open Sea combat: Korhal IV: from the PHB: "A fireball spell is an explosion of flame that detonates with a low roar and deals 1d6 points of fire damage per caster level (maximum 10d6) to every creature within the area. Unattended objects also take this damage." No mention is made of how long the explosion lasts. Moreover, cloths and ropes which typically have low hardness and hitpoint ratings tend to get blown away by something even like a fireball. In fact, it's well within the object parameters to rule that cloths and ropes are "especially vulnerable to flame" and overrule the half damage general rule and possibly ignore hardness. More from the PHB: "The fireball sets fire to combustibles and damages objects in the area." Wood is a combustible. So are cloths and rope. So fireball sets fire to practically every single thing it touches on a wooden Sail Age ship. I suppose you can put out a fireball spell with water, but I doubt there'll be anything of the sails left to save. Well paint me embarrassed. I guess I got mixed up with another spell. You're right, Fireball is like the tactical nuke of fantasy seafaring. Sale of Wheels of Wind and Water: Korhal IV: Microsoft is also in the business of making money. You don't see Microsoft selling off trade secrets and key intellectual property, now, do you? The importance of monopoly cannot be lost on a Dragonmarked House - a house centered on economic power and that's been an experienced monopoly for hundreds of years. Aha, but Microsoft *does* sell its finished product to consumers! The difference is that trade secrets and key intellectual property is used to develop new versions of Windows, whereas a finished Wheel is basically a complete product that (presumably) can't be tampered with or replicated without Lyrandar's assistance. Microsoft selling key intellectual property is like Lyrandar selling heirs. It won't happen. |
| gaerfindel06-07-05, 07:43 PM | :bump: Since I love boats & sailing and I'm facinated by the minutia of life at sea, I thought I share a few of the thoughts I've had, today, regarding such: Sail Power for Lyrandar Skyships It is a fallacy to think that Lyrandar skyships always travel under their own power -- that is to say, that of the bound elemental holding the vessel aloft. While certainly true that they can do so, their is nothing requiring that they must. In fact, while some of the more recent designs to come out of Trolanport are of sleek design and carry nothing more more sail-like than the rudder, most skyships employ sails of one design or another; often to great advantage. Their are a number of reasons for this. In the early years, it was not known how large an elemental would be needed to buoy the weight of a flying boat, soarwood construction or no. It was thus that the first expirirnets in building such craft only had minor elementals bound into their rings, elementals of enough power to lift the vessels a few hundred feet off the ground, but nothing more. Such early craft still required a means of propulsion, and sails -- being a long mastered technology -- filled the need nicely. It must be noted that considerable effort goes into controlling the bound elemental that powers a skyship's flight. Even a Lyrandar heir using their famous wheels of wind and water can find eight hours maintaining an influence on the elemental taxing. Seeing as how there exists a finite supply of Storm heirs -- and with the severing of the Lightning Rail an increasing demand for Lyrandar's services in overland shipping -- means other than influencing a "hot-tempered ring of fire" must be found. Thus, sails. The astute reader will quickly see whither I'm leading. Sail power is, as stated, a known technology. The Windwrights' Guild trains the finest sailors in all the Five Nations and beyond. Binding greater and more powerful -- and thus, more willful -- elementals into ever larger skyships is difficult for the master shipwrights and summoners of Trolanport. Accomplishments such as the Pride of Storm are laudable, certainly; they are, however, not reproduceable en masse. A typical merchantman skyship is equipped with a bowsp'rit and for'd leaning mast, each supporting one or more broad, square sails of the kind found most commonly on their water-bound cousins. These broad sails are placed as forward on the ship as possible to best take advantage of the wind's favour granted by the Mark of Storm. In many cases -- again as with their surface-bound cousins -- a skyship will have long bracing yards extening out from the sides to accomodate & control otherwise impossibly wide sails. Thus rigged, a modest-sized skyship can be piloted by a less expirienced Storm Heir than would be required for a vessel who lift and motive power is the result of an elemental. This also allows for a smaller -- and thus, more easily summoned -- elemental per vessel tonnage. This has the result of either lowering the cost of construction for a given-sized ship, or permitting heavier ships for an elemental of given strength. Either way, the advantages are obvious. Advanced Sailing Techniques Using Magic Enlarge/reduce -- Use on your own ship to temporarily boost the sail area. Use offensively (against another's ship) to decrease their sail area; effectively stealing their wind. Bags of Holding -- Exceptionally useful for holding extra sails onboard, where space is oft at a premium. Rope Trick -- The sail you need is in the sailbag of holding, and you need to get it up and unfurled fast. No problems. Open the bag. Pull out the part of the sail that anchors to the deck/halyards/stays. (You did pack the sail correctly, didn't you?) Tie the other end of the sailbag to a free line and cast rope trick on that end. Voila! up and out comes the sail; instant spinniker. Trim to the wind and laugh as you pass your competition. Levitate -- Also good for getting that persnickety piece of rigging where it needs to be. Or fooling with someone else's rigging... |
| Roxlimn06-09-05, 08:56 AM | I'm thinking of continuing an ongoing naval discussion in Khorvaire at >>this thread<< (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?p=6399806#post6399806) |