Introduction

"

I dream of being a _{Laestrygonian.}

"

If you’ve browsed a number of projects here on WorldAnvil, you’ll notice mine is missing the World Meta section. Well, it’s not missing, I’ve simply hidden it. I had something filled out, but it was very slapdash, and also not at all helpful. Its content resembles the front page blurb or the "copyright" footer at the bottom of this page. I’ve opted to write a proper introduction instead of filling out a series of canned questions.
I like to think my project here is unique. I don’t mean that to be an expression of pride, to say that "I’m so creative, and no one has ever made anything like me before"; “unique” is often used as a euphemism for “bad”. I’ve spent a fair bit of time browsing random worlds on this site, and I have yet to come across another project like mine. Setting aside content, even structurally my project doesn’t fit the norm. I’ve noticed projects here tend to fall into a bimodal distribution of completion: projects are either very expansively and thoroughly developed and realised, with a beautiful custom layout, or (more often) they’re extremely underdeveloped, having a few stub and placeholder articles, a template layout, and often having been seemingly abandoned for some time. I’ve seen few that seem to fall into the middling level of development I would classify mine under. As for content, again, I don’t mean to imply others are not creative, but I've not seen a world with the same themes and ideas as mine. It may be difficult for one to tell that, as (as per the front page blurb) a lot of it is still simply in my mind, or has only been expressed in role-play sessions.

Layout

I've laid out this project in the style of a wiki, with extensive hyperlinking between articles and an only mildly-stylised layout. More importantly, though, it is laid out to be as factual as possible, with as little conjecture or cultural bias within articles. The information in this project does not necessarily reflect the knowledge a given person from a given time would have. This, of course, being a conworld, theoretically anything can be known, and more is known to me than is put here. This project presents essentially the information that could be reasonably known about this world in a modern timeframe.

Two Parallel Projects

There are two different aspects to this project: Tentpole and Geshkara. Tentpole is the mechanical role-playing system, and Geshkara is the world used to run it.
Tentpole is a role-playing system created out of my experiences with 5^th edition Dungeons & Dragons. The impetus behind creating this system is to address the many issues I have with the way 5^th edition D&D works and how it interacts with my world; as such it makes many of the same assumptions and strives for many of the same goals as D&D, and many of its systems are similar (for example, to hit with a melee weapon you roll a d20 and add a modifier, different classes have different hit dice, etc.). This system also bears a great deal of resemblance to Pathfinder, as Pathfinder’s systems do solve a number of (what I perceive to be) problems in D&D. However, Pathfinder does not solve all of its problems, and introduces new ones, on top of being extraordinarily complex. Tentpole is the conclusion of years of running and playing D&D, and a lot of free time at work.
Tentpole was specifically designed to work with my world and my worldbuilding. That’s not to say it will only work with mine, though. Just as D&D works with countless worlds created by many different people across our globe, there is no reason this system shouldn’t work for other worlds. That said, though, just as how my world became incompatible with D&D because there was not enough common ground between the visions of the system and the world, there will be worlds that do not work with Tentpole due to conflicting visions.
Briefly, some of the major changes from D&D to Tentpole are:

• Character progression is more choice dependent, with few prescribed features, and a perk choice (similar to a feat) every level.
• There are no subclasses; specialisation is done through perks.
• The classes are battlemage, berserker, commander, diplomat, healer, infiltrator, man-at-arms, paladin, ranger, thaumaturge, warlock, and wizard.
• The max level is 10.
• The abilities are Strength, Constitution, Agility, Perception, Intelligence, Willpower, and Charisma.
• Ability scores range from 1 to 10, with each point increase conferring a +1 increase to its modifier
• Damage resistance and vulnerabilities are numerical adjustment values, instead of divisive or multiplicative factors.
• Armours have natural resistances to different types of physical damage, making the differences between piercing, slashing, and crushing damage an important distinction.
• Weapons may be capable of dealing multiple damage types.
• Characters’ inventory is grid-based instead of weight based, with some items being more easily accessible than others.
• Spellcasting is based on a mana point system rather than spell slots.

Geshkara is the world used to run Tentpole. Initially, created for running Dungeons & Dragons, it grew out of the general vision D&D has for a fantasy world. At its start, though, it was always darker, more cynical than D&D: the elves were a proud, stubborn, and moribund race, the dwarves and dragonborn xenophobic and isolationist, humanity violent and expansionistic, magic was oft viewed with suspicion, and characters were often cruel or Machiavellian. As time continued, though, and I continued developing it, it began to deviate further and further from that high fantasy vision of D&D and the Forgotten Realms, as I became more confident in my worldbuilding and began to exercise my own vision. At some point it became so fundamentally different from the vision of D&D that it became largely incompatible with the rule system of D&D: no alignment system, entirely homebrewed races, different magic items, a different way in which magic works in the world, no devils, no drow, a different cosmology, etc.
Some lore assumptions this world makes that differ from standard D&D:

• Different peoples and cultures have different interpretations of the gods. The extent to which gods are real, their motivations and intentions, and the extent of their interventions in the mortal realm are frequently debated.
• Divine magic and druidic magic are not distinct from arcane magic. They are derived from the same place, even if some of their practitioners are not aware of this. Healers and mages may serve a god, and believe their magic to have been gifted to them by said deity, but there is no absolute proof of this.
• Magic is generally dangerous and can expose its users and those around it to terrible things. Disagreement over the place of magic in society and the extent to which it should be practised is constant. As time marches on, it is generally more restricted, socially, legally, and inherently by powerful magical intervention limiting its potential expression on the material plane.
• Magic was initially learned by humans from interpreting ancient works of the long-dead elven civilisation; thus magic is recited in Elvish and most magic users and scholars know the language.
• The nonhuman races are mostly different: there are no halflings, gnomes, tieflings, etc. There were elves, and there were/are dwarves, lizardfolk, and dragonborn.
• The world is highly anthropocentric, more so than D&D, and as with magic, the world generally becomes more mundane, thus anthropocentric, as time continues. Different races tend to distrust one another and segregate amongst themselves. Nonhumans have few, if any, polities larger than clans, tribes, or settlements. As such, humanity is not monopolar, and mechanically consists of distinct races rather than mechanically similar subraces.
• Alignment is nonexistent/unimportant and does not have a real or tangible expression in the world or the planes.
• The structure of the outer planes is entirely different, and much more mysterious/poorly understood. There is no Blood War, no Modrons, no celestials, etc. The motivations of most extraplanar entities are usually interpreted by men to be malignant and evil, but their motives are hardly ever human ones or ones even comprehensible to humans.
• The underdark is largely unexplored, and thought by many not to exist. It is inhabited mostly not by sapient creatures (drow, duergar, svirfneblins, mind flayers do not exist), but is filled with the ancient ruins of many long-dead (many not being anthropomorphic) civilisations.
• The world is much darker than the typical high fantasy of D&D. This is not a world for valiant heroes of sword and sorcery. Mundane struggles that are often glossed over in D&D, such as disease, famine, xenophobia, fanaticism, and court struggles are common. Fantastic things do happen, and players are often caught up in them, but where in a typical high fantasy, their adventures would gain them fame, fortune, and favour, here they often endure traumatic experiences, bear the weight of terrible knowledge and choices, and few will ever know or recognise their accomplishments; or maybe the ascend to divinity and leave the material world behind.
• The world is not intended to be pessimistic, but it is not meant to be cheerful or whimsical. That is not to say cheerful or whimsical things do not occur, but that they are not the defining theme.
• When dealing with magic, horror elements will often be present. These elements do not centre on the gothic, as with most horror implemented in D&D, but usually on the cosmic and/or psychological.

Time

Time is very important to me. I don't mean I've spent a lot of time thinking about how my calendar will work, or how many hours are in a day, how do the people tell time. While those are important considerations, what I mean is a deeper sense of time: centuries, ages, epochs—how the world changes over time. I've noticed among other worlds (even professionally published ones), seldom is more than one timeframe presented. D&D, and most fantasy in general, assumes a high medeival time period, or one approximating it at least (for example, full plate armour was not in use until the Late Middle Ages, beginning around the time the Turks were sieging Constantinople with cannons). The High Middle Ages lasted about 250 years in the real world. At the beginning of the High Middle Ages, around 1000 AD, the Anglo-Saxons ruled England, having conquered the Danelaw less than 50 years prior, Scandanavia was still largely pagan; Abbasid Baghdad was sacked by the Seljuq Turks in 1055. At the end, around 1250 AD, England was Norman, Scandanavia was Christian, and the Abbasids fled the Mongol invasions to Mamluk Egypt, with their Turkic army. In even just the 250 years of the High Middle Ages, a lot changed.
Very often I see very little room for change in fantasy worlds, especially ones meant for role-playing; they're treated more like a stage, a sandbox for the players to trounce around in. While this can be fun, and has its place, it nevertheless makes the world seem less alive. Maps in the real world change quite often, and they changed a lot more until recently, but yet you usually see one political map presented for a fantasy world. That sort of thing implies that borders don't change, that these peoples don't fight, they don't go to war, they don't have any ambition. Without a certain level of dynamism, a world can feel more like a theme-park. The real world is one of change, chaos, and conflict. It's one of surprise, and events that often don't make a lot of sense. Too often a fantasy world seems stagnant, like the events happening don't really matter to the grand scheme of things, or that the only events that do are the ones the players are directly involved in. While the world exists for the players, it doesn't revolve around their characters.
Another problem created by this focus on a sole "present" that every game in a world is run in, is that it often leads to an underdeveloped past. Not always, worlds like Eberron or The Elder Scrolls do not have this problem, but many have a past of little detail. A lot of worlds will have a lot of detail about the ancient past, and how it affected the world "now"—long-dead civilisations, ruins, ancient manuscripts—but have very little with respect to the recent past. Often the past that's focused on is the past of things no longer around, which never interacted directly with anything contemporary; there's a ton of information about things that happened 2000 years ago, but almost nothing about what happened 2 or 20 or 200 years ago. It makes the present feel disconnected from the past. A lot of times real history can feel like this as well, which I ascribe mostly to how it's taught. There's very little emphasis put on continuity in school. When I learned about the first World War in school, the Ottoman Empire had been brought up as the "sick man of Europe", to which I thought, "Wait, who? I've never heard of these people. What's their history? How are they the 'sick man'? How did they get that way? Where did they come from?" When applying this kind of process to worldbuilding, it's easy to get a group of people without a past. A lot of peoples and races in fantasy worlds seem authochthonous (sometimes they literally are), and lack a history. Humans from all over the world miraculously all happen to speak the same language, conveniently dubbed "Common", and usually no explanation for how or why everyone speaks this is ever given. Common (or any language for that matter) is almost never given an Urheimat, and therefore the people have no origin. It's for convenience of course, but it makes little sense, and if you start really exploring the past of your world it becomes a large problem. This is the reason there are so many languages in Geshkara. Language is important. Culture is important, and language is culture. It's important for a people to have a past: they have their own mythology, their own language, customs, values, and societal structure.
Beyond this, the past is important to me because I like to jump around the timeline of my world when running games: jump forward a few hundred years for one campaign, back a thousand or so for another. It would be incredibly credulous to try to maintain the same status quo thousands of years apart. Different people lived different places, worshipped different gods, spoke different languages, and lived in different kingdoms (or tribes even). Of course the peoples of the past (present?) are often ancestors of peoples in the future, but that helps the continuity. Technology changes, too. In Geshkara, people in the 27^th century have muskets, people in the 21^st didn't. People didn't start wearing full suits of tempered steel plate armour until the of the 22^nd century. Long before the Common Age, people didn't know how to work iron. To run games in vastly different time periods, it's important not to focus too much or get too attached to a single time period, and to really flesh out the past of a world. I consider the "present" of my world to be whenever the most recent (in the timeline of Geshkara) campaign took place, but I have ideas for the future. If you read the section on differences between this world and a standard D&D one, you'll have noticed a trend in the world: that it becomes increasingly mundane. It's useful for me to have this trend because it helps me envision what the past, and the future, look like from the reference of a certain timepoint. By the 27^th century, magic is illegal most places in the oecumene, most people are monotheistic (or at least monolatrous), and populations of non-humans continue to dwindle or go into hiding. Eventually people fade ever further into obscurity, non-humans will disappear, technology will improve, and the world will begin looking a lot like ours.
The current time I give as present is approximately Renaissance, with much of the world having a renewed interest in scholarly pursuits following a period of turmoil, growing urban populations, a nascent middle class, and wheellock firearms. Some of the greatest differences are that the religious wars, like the ones that defined continental Europe during much of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, occured a few centuries ago, and between monotheists and pagans, rather than divisions of the same religion (Catholics vs. Protestants) or between monotheistic religions (Christian Europeans vs. Ottoman Muslims), and that the known world is still relatively small and the Age of Exploration has not yet begun, as there is no place analogous to Constantinople and the Straits, and no Ottomans for them to fall to.

The Names

Perhaps superflous, but for those curious:
Why “Tentpole”? At the time, I chose it simply because it came to mind. Initially it was intended just to be a placeholder, but I came to want to keep it. A tentpole, after all, gives a tent its structure, supporting the soft canvas so it can house its occupants, while the tentpole itself is still quite flexible. I liked it. Tentpole holds up the canvas of my world for the stories to be built inside of it, while still remaining flexible to change and develop.
As for the name of Geshkara, it’s something I’ve never been entirely happy with. I could never really decide on a single name, as, much like how different languages have different words for the word “Earth”, so to do the different peoples have different names for the world I’ve called Geshkara. The name “Geshkara” is the Faltish word for the world (properly written geşkȧrȧ), derived from the Proto-Serrenic *geʿesik. Other words for the world include the Elvish Duìnnè, Dvekmenu mir (миръ), from the Ald Duekman mirъ (ⰏⰉⰓⰟ), Varaso tierra from Vallaran terrā and Dacian montro, from Vallaran mundus, Tira Vellan ga (γα), Horil kufkjot, and Dwarvish dgarvzhat (Դգառվժաթ).