First Age Cities of Note

StarHawk

StarHawk

Member
I'm going to be attempting my Solar game idea again. The one where a circle of First Age Solars wake up in the second age. What I really want to impress upon them is how dramatically things have changed from the first age to the second. And to do that I thought it'd be fun to have comparisons for the key cities that were important in the first age, either being swallowed by the wyld or dramtically changed like Nexus was.


So far I thought it would be interesting to make Rathess more like Athens, a city all for beauty and knowledge. the Imperial City more like Sparta or Rome very war heavy, and probably Denadsor being the other one. Nexus as I understand was once upon a time ago called Hollow. But aside from that little bit I have nothing. I don't have access to the Wonders of The Lost Age book yet, but for the mean time I'd like your guy's imput to start.
 
Well, note this my dear, Imperial City never existed in the First Age. It was a farmstead with an important manse there. It literally was a dung heap town. The Sword of Creation Manse was the only thing worth a damn in the whole region.
 
Chiaroscuro would probably make Rip Van First Age freak out. Arguably the most beautiful city in the First Age, with its multicolored glass everywhere, now a shattered ruin teeming with the remnants of dead people.


Oh, and time to pimp my First Age Map Moasic
 
Lookshy was also a bigger first age city, although i won't even try to spell its name without a book.


Then there was The Red City out in the southern desert, there is a referance in Autobot book.


There is the sunken city that the Levithan lives in. From Wonders of the Lost Age and probably also Lunar and the 2 sea book from 1st edition.


In Kingdom of Halta there is mentioned a hovering first age city deep in the forest.


And isn't there also a crater, that once was a few big manses with city around, on the way to The Invisible Fortress? or was that just fluff from my ST?
 
Luthe is the sunken city of the leviathan and I think deleshen, i.e. lookshy was just some military outpost. well constructed but unimportant. the capital of the realm was on the slopes of the earth pole.


hmmm there are some other cities mentioned, speriminim where the queen of fangs now lives for example.


there must be some lost and forgotten first age town deep down in the south where tamuz and his mistress once lived and ruled over those people who later became the dune people.


and there is another glass city high up in the north which is mentioned in the twilight caste book in one of the flashbacks in which a dying twilight stories his memory and knowledge in the shattered glass of that town. lily the misstress of the hidden valley or whatever the brothel is called now collects those in an attempt to restore her past. I think the halsanti league dug that town up or something like that.


then there is gethamane... hmmmm sijan probably existed in the first age, too and is probably pretty intact.
 
The old capital was Meru, on the slopes of the Omphalos. There's information about it in the Blessed Isle book and the 2d corebook, I think.


Gethamane in the first age wan't a public city; it was a giant city-embassy to the beings beneath the world, Mountain Folk and Sentient Darkbrood alike. There was a city there, but it wasn't just open for settling or visits.


Our good man Wordman has a fine and beautiful mosaic of First Age creation, I actually find the normal map a little boring after seeing it. I'm not certain where he's hiding it, though. It featured another massive city in the east.
 
WhiteWall not that that was its first age name. Almost not ruined. Was a big focus for worship.
 
More than that: it was not just a temple city, it was the greatest Temple ever built. Every stone was lovingly crafted by the same Zenith Solar, each a prayer to the Unconquered Sun, the city father of Whitewall. The whole city was built around the geomantic amplification of worship, such that every prayer in whitewall to the Unconquered Sun was a unique beauty, worthy of the king of the gods.


In the first age, the city hummed with the prayers and hymns of the hundreds of priests and priestesses constantly singing his honours, and it, too, was not open to just anyone. It probably didn't even have trade; it was a city-monastary to the Patron God of the very Realm.


To see it as it is today, with portions of the city having been demolished and rebuilt, interrupting the Geomantic flow, with trade and travel passing through the city willy-nilly, with people living irreverent lives and speaking not a prayer during their lives to the Sun, that must be an evil seeming thing to returned Solars from the First Age.
 
Samiel said:
Our good man Wordman has a fine and beautiful mosaic of First Age creation, I actually find the normal map a little boring after seeing it. I'm not certain where he's hiding it, though. It featured another massive city in the east.
Click to expand...
See my earlier post for a link. I've also updated the description to list which cities are canonical and which are not.
 
About the only question I have is where's the other nine tenths of creation that should be on that map? :)


....And certainly something these first age boys would flip out over... "What do you mean this is all of creation?!"
 
I agree that the first age map of creation would have been far bigger than the map covers, but give a guy a break! Although, it seemed at first to me that the north and south didn't get a big boost in size. I looked again at CW's suggestion and noted that it was, in fact, a vast improvement. I had been comparing the relative amounts of ice on the maps, which remains the same, rather than landmarks. It stands to reason, I suppose, that the poles moved further outward as the world got bigger in the First Age.
 
Dracogryff said:
About the only question I have is where's the other nine tenths of creation that should be on that map? :)
Click to expand...
See the smiley? I was teasing. It was supposed to be a joke. It is a quite impressive piece of work indeed, and I do think it lovely. Relax a little and don't jump to conclusions, eh? *chuckles*
 
Actually, if anyone can find a canonical reference for exactly how much bigger Creation was in the First Age, I'd like to see it. My map is about 50% larger on each axis.
 
Thankfully there's no specific reference, but it is implied that She Who Lives In Her Name brought creation to its knees, making it a fraction of its previous size. During the Solar deliberative, they used Wyld Cauldron Technique and Reality Engines to make the world bigger even than it was before the war.


The Usurpation then smashed the world massively, cutting it down to size quite nicely, and then the Fair Folk ate the rest, leaving what's left.


There are rough figures for each event somewhere, but twice the size it is now would fit the bill for shortly after the Primordial war or for the Early Shogunate, I should think myself.


I think the Blessed Isle is somehow more beautiful on your map due to its decreased relative size. It makes it more of a Jewel in the World than the centrepiece.


Thank you, Wordman.
 
Actually, gentlemen, I remember reading in a source (either the Northern book for First Ed or perhaps Wonders of the Lost Age) that Creation is only about 40 to 50% smaller since the Contagion. This is not counting the Pre-FA hissy fit of She Who Lives In Her Name.
 
Or, more importantly I should think, the Usurpation. I believe that was the biggest downer creation saw before the Contagion, what with the superweapons and crazy solars going nuts and whatnot. A lot more devastation was done there, I think, than by She Who Lives In Her Shitty Name.
 
Actually no. Seeing as it's said several times she blew away two-thirds of the Creation back then than the Solars did. Now, I think the land mass loss there is a biiiiiiiiiit more significant.
 
Hey fool, we're discussing what's not known as much as what is! It never fully divulged how much the Solars VS DBs tiff cost creation.


Still, 2/3 is a lot to top.
 
From an earlier thread, people might be interested in how the influence of the elemental poles works on my mosaic map. As an example, the city of Mistrock is equidistant from the poles of Air, Water and Earth. (You might also note that the Rathess book claims that the city is similarly equidistant from Fire, Wood and Earth, but its position on the map doesn't bear this out, either in the First or Second Age.)


elemental-mosaic.png
 
In Jack's game, we compiled a geomantic map of the Blessed Isle to try and predict where all the War Manses were. It was a good effort, teh win.


It also went some way to encouraging my fellow player Cormac that Occult really was a powerful skill.
 
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