AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

I can't seem to remember where we are so...

Does anyone mind circling where we are and putting a "you are here" by it?

Dev Disco wrote:

These two were made by Jaqueline. They are not perfectly accurate, but give a good image of Amia and its whereabouts, as well as those of other module islands:

viewtopic.php?p=70752#p70752

And Khem

Quote:

Khem is an island in the Alamber Sea, the easternmost reach of the Sea of Fallen Stars. It is located south of the Alaor, north of where the Ship of Gods used to be, and east from the Untheric cities Messemprar and Mourktar. Situated in the middle of a sea trafficked by the navies of Mulhorand, Thay and Unther, as well as traders and pirates from Chessenta and more western lands, Khem has become a meeting point and, often enough, a clashing point of different cultures.

Very helpful!

Thanks guys!

Actually, your all very wrong.

We are located here.

Hey, just me being oddly curious, but where is Tarkuul georgraphically located? I mean, I know the portal is in western amia, but where is the actual castle?

From what i understand, its an island off the coast of Wharftown.

Does Zashibon still exist as a place you can go? Or is it just unreachable in the Abyss now?

It's...in the Abyss. You can't walk to the Abyss, from my understanding. If that's what you meant.

the abyss is a different plane, so you can't walk there from cordor. that said you can reach a way there by foot and not relying on pre-binded portals.

jimbono1 wrote:

From what i understand, its an island off the coast of Wharftown.

Yep. Distance? idk.

I always assumed it was close by, like eye distance or visible at least with a spyglass. I have no idea if that's based on anything, but that's what I thought. Something the people and at least the fishers of Wharftown noticed when it came up. Otherwise it probably would've remained unknown for a long time, anyway. Well, except for the portal there, so there's really no telling.

TormakSaber wrote:

jimbono1 wrote:

From what i understand, its an island off the coast of Wharftown.

Yep. Distance? idk.

Could it possibly be part of Lumorier? Or sitting on top of what's left of it?

Glyph wrote:

the abyss is a different plane, so you can't walk there from cordor. that said you can reach a way there by foot and not relying on pre-binded portals.

This seems to be contradictory

There are a couple ways to portals that lead to the abyss that you can walk into/through and end up there. (Aside from someoen using a pre-binded protal rod) is what he means

Ah, that makes more sense, thanks.
Hmm, I know of one, but don't tell me any more.

Xaviera wrote:

TormakSaber wrote:

jimbono1 wrote:

From what i understand, its an island off the coast of Wharftown.

Yep. Distance? idk.

Could it possibly be part of Lumorier? Or sitting on top of what's left of it?

No. Not possible in the least.

1 : Becuase Lumorier ... blew up. Canonically. Ugh.

2: Because Tarkuul is the remains of a flying Netherese city.

Is Tarkuul flying? If so how did it survive?

I don't believe it's airborn. It's the remnants and what's left, now floating at sea, I think. Tormak?

Pretty much, yep.

BrainSplitter wrote:

I don't believe it's airborn. It's the remnants and what's left, now floating at sea, I think. Tormak?

Yups. Just a floating island. "just". It is an important distinction to make: It is not an actual landmass like an island would be. Is is literally a water-buoyant chunk of land floating in the water. You culd swim underneath it if you liked.

As for how it survived, that is not a tale i'm willing to tell here.

TormakSaber wrote:

BrainSplitter wrote:

I don't believe it's airborn. It's the remnants and what's left, now floating at sea, I think. Tormak?

Yups. Just a floating island. "just". It is an important distinction to make: It is not an actual landmass like an island would be. Is is literally a water-buoyant chunk of land floating in the water. You culd swim underneath it if you liked.

As for how it survived, that is not a tale i'm willing to tell here.

AH!!!! I wanna know!!!! Wait... I wanna know IC!!!!

Erm.... ._. Knowing noone knows that IG, and its in no known books.... how would I find that ICly?

I don't know. How would you? That's your job.

Now I have to find out. I know that Sakkors was over the ocean and sunk when Karsus pulled his stunt. And of course Cuda resurrected Undrentide for a final flight before it came crashing back to Toril (but everyone knows that right?).

Hmm, something to find out IC.
*adds it to the list*

No, not really.

Quite frankely bugger all people should know anything about the Netherese and Netheril . Remember that in NWN you only find out a bunch of this stuff due to the campaign. 99% of Toril probably don't know who the Netherese even are, let alone the history behind them.

I never thought that way myself, actually, because Karsus' Folly is so ripe to be a story about hubris. I believe his story has been passed down so much that a cultural knowledge of Nether has remained intact, particularly amongst the arcane traditions, in the sense of "don't ever make the same mistake and reach for things beyond your grasp".

I assume people know as much about ancient Nether as we know about ancient Greece.

I'd say its more like Ancient Babalyon. Definitive statements about Ancient Greece can be made from common knowledge.
The tale is still there. But the spells, mechanics and things have been embellished heaps. Likely Karsus is a fable told around a table to teach a lesson. Not something anyone takes seriously, but a method of deliverance. Definitive knowledge of Netherese culture and technology shouldn't be available to the common man, and only tears and shred of knowledge should be available to those that experience it. Even the bardiest bards likely don't know the truths, only the tales told by adventurers that have had encounters with all Netherese relics.

I mean, there are plenty of tales in Faerun about adventurers going into a ruin when they are low level, not realizing what the ruin actually is, and then returning at a later date in life, with many more levels and experiences behind them, then figuring out it's actually a ruin of a piece of the lost Netherese culture, but still having little to no idea what it does, how it was made, or why it was made.

From what I was to understand. Netheril is a fable. A story told, but with no definitive truths known, except by those that go out of their way to research stuff. With the exception of extraordinary beings, people who come into contact with Netherese technology and magic do not return to tell the tale. If we didn't have the PnP book, little would be known about them. But the books essential for DM's. Sad fact that players can get a hold of it to.

That's one thing about Amia that I do dislike. Knowledge of things is treated in such an off the shoulder manner that things such as Netherese stuff is simply assumed to be known. It's a common attitude towards knowledge, least among a lot of characters I've encountered on Amia. I'm guilty of it myself at times, it kinda just happens. Maybe it's simply a side effect of having all this knowledge at your fingertips. In a PnP game, the DM takes away the books.

Yossarin wrote:

I never thought that way myself, actually, because Karsus' Folly is so ripe to be a story about hubris. I believe his story has been passed down so much that a cultural knowledge of Nether has remained intact, particularly amongst the arcane traditions, in the sense of "don't ever make the same mistake and reach for things beyond your grasp".I assume people know as much about ancient Nether as we know about ancient Greece.

The fall of Netheril was only about 1,200 years ago, according to Rivalen Tanthul (former high priest of Shar, now a Chosen of Mask, and is a Shadovar). I'm thinking along the same lines as Yossarin here.

Fall of Netheril happened in -339DR

Which still equates to roughly 2 millenia, only with what I imagine are probably several spotty dark ages compared to our great dark age.

I do agree that the "facts" about it are mostly shrouded in mystery (history) and relegated purely to the educated caste, of which there are far fewer in FR than there are in our world. I think if you say "the Fall of Netheril" even some peasants will know what you mean - an ancient flying magical city that fell because a magician did a bad thing, whatever that bad thing was - but be ignorant of any of the actual factual details.

Same thing as today. You tell a Florida State fan "ancient Greece" and he can give you names and dates and places and city-states. Tell an Alabama State fan "ancient Greece" and he's like, "Old place."

Yossarin wrote:

Tell an Alabama State fan "ancient Greece" and he's like, "Old place."

Oh, now you gone and done it, you had to go there, huh?
That's because the Florida State fans are all old enough to remember ancient Greece, too bad they can't remember what color socks they have on at the moment.

I agree with Yossarin. I don't have any material to back this up right now, but if it was a big secret it wouldn't get referenced all the time. Ancient Netherese tombs and ruins are something every higher level adventure party in the North has probably delved into. I think it's widely known that the Anauroch hides the ruins of Netheril. The rise of human culture in the North is connected with Netheril. Furthermore, the Netherese city of Shade Enclave has just recently returned to Faerûn and taken a major role in politics, so at least by now most people are reminded of the past.

It's certainly nothing widely documented. That's mostly because there isn't the kind of scientific media we have today, where I can read a research published in an Italian university on my computer screen. I imagine there's an army of archeologists and wizards studying the remains of the empire, but the knowledge is fairly esoteric because people don't talk about it on the market.

I think scholars could probably gleam a bit of the truth, but to most people the Fall of Netheril, should they have even heard of it, would be a story of man trying to equal the gods and failing, destroying their great empire in the process, like the Tower of Babel.

The Tower of Babel is a myth (and I mean that in the proper genre sense of the word, not the false "untrue story" connotation people seem to think of). It doesn't attempt to depict a historical event at all, and that's why it's amigious and mysterious. It's not as if its writers couldn't have preserved accurate historical tradition too, if that was their goal. The Fall of Netheril has mythical aspects, but it's very much a historical event. It is recent, it had major political consequences, evidence of it can still be found all around the North, and there's a bunch of long-lived races around who could tell you about their great grandfather who saw it.

The Realms are fairly advanced when it comes to intellectual culture. They have high quality history and a tradition of bards preserving stories in canonized format for centuries. The earlier comparison to our knowledge of ancient Babylon is pretty accurate, but doesn't support Selvec's point: we know a remarkable deal about ancient Babylon. The entire Western world has had a lot of surprisingly accurate records in the Bible for 2000 years, and the majority of primary sources have been known for centuries. Yes, the common man probably knows nothing more than "it was big and decadent" but anyone with a passing interest can tell you the names and deeds of kings, and when they ruled, as well as details of many military expeditions and the related war reparations. Why would this be any different with Netheril? I seriously doubt all records of such a vast empire suddenly disappeared, especially since this is a world where magical recordings and divination (Legend Lore, anyone?) are relatively accessible.

I wouldn't call it Tower of Babel.

Stuff that happened on this page
http://www.otherrealm.net/other_html/ca ... -3389.html
would be tower of babel stuff.

Well, Tower of Babel is still a myth, a religiously motivated text whose purpose is to explain something universal and fundamental about humanity. It doesn't relate history as we understand it. That's why it's a bad comparison: there can very well be similar myths about ancient Netheril and older times, but that's no reason to think there isn't historical knowledge as well. It's not like the Tower of Babel is some big mystery to us, either. We know its context just fine. After the Israeli diaspora in Babylonia, it became a symbol of godlessness, idolatry, but also God's tool for punishing Israel for its sins. The myth also tells a universal story of human hubris, much like the Karsus' Folly. Just like we can trace the historical origins of the Tower of Babel, we can trace the very specific historical events behind the myth of Karsus.

I wanted to add this last night, but I'd just turned off the computer when I thought of it: Every historian knows there's one thing that determines how much we know about a subject. No, it's not time or place. It's not importance either. It's sources. We know about history through sources. That's why we know so much about ancient Greece but not ancient Scandinavia: we have plenty of primary and secondary sources. The Greek wrote history like no one before, they wrote plays and philosophy. Many other people interacted with them, leaving us a handful of secondary sources, notably Roman ones. Their culture passed onto us through the Hellenistic world and the Middle Ages, because those sources were valued and preserved. Greece has also been the site of much archeological discovery. We don't know so much about ancient Greece because it's important to Western civilization. It's important to Western civilization because we know so much about it.

Now compare this to Netheril: an empire of mages in a time that was arguably intellectually more advanced than Earth's antiquity. An empire full of mages who could and did write: personal journals, research papers, and probably a crapload of official documents. An empire that ruled most of the North and disappeared suddenly, leaving behind more archeological remains than anything else in the region. These are all sources we could find in real life, too. But now consider the unique features of a magical world: arcane devices or spellchambers that store information magically, in holograms or gems or whatever. And just imagine the divinations mages and priests have access to: you can cast Legend Lore and bring to mind all "legendary" information about a place, object or person, even if those legends are forgotten or never were public knowledge. A priest could simply ask his god directly. I already mentioned elves and other old races, who may have witnessed these events first-hand only three to five generations ago. Considering the rise and subsequent fall of Netheril was partially the elves' responsibility, I'm sure they preserve the stories meticulously. And finally, there's religion: of the Netherese gods, Amaunator's worship has survived in the church of Lathander until this day. Jannath has transformed into Chauntea, Targus into Garagos, Kozah into Talos, and Jergal, Shar and Selûne are still kicking. Tyche became Tymora and Beshaba. I'm sure most, if not all of these churches preserve ancient tradition and mythology about the prehistory of their gods. They wouldn't have forgotten all about Netheril and the role their gods played there in just two millenia.

So all in all, I'd say we have more sources about ancient Netheril than we have about any Earth realm of equivalent temporal distance, save perhaps the Roman empire. A rule of thumb: don't assume we're smarter than Faerûnian scholars. If we could figure it out, they surely can. They've studied their own world all their lives, after all.

IronAngel wrote:

The Tower of Babel is a myth (and I mean that in the proper genre sense of the word, not the false "untrue story" connotation people seem to think of). It doesn't attempt to depict a historical event at all, and that's why it's amigious and mysterious.
Well, Tower of Babel is still a myth, a religiously motivated text whose purpose is to explain something universal and fundamental about humanity. It doesn't relate history as we understand it.

This is your opinion, my opinion is that it actually did happen, and the result was the multitude of languages and spreading of mankind that we have now. Still, to this day, no one lives in the area where Babylon was, just like God said it would happen.

Haha. I'm serious, though: "myth" doesn't mean it's a false account. Myth is a literary genre we use a lot in both Biblical exegesis and comparative religion, and the Tower of Babel meets the requirements. Whether or not there is divine truth to the story (not that we should consider that for one second in a rational discussion), it is a fact that its style is not one of disinterested history, and its ambiguity is due to intentional literary traits rather than the mysteriousness of the subject matter.

Alright, I looked up myth and that account does fall into the first definition, only because there is no physical proof of the tower remaining though, and all we have now is the biblical rendering. The Bible boils down to personal interpretation anyway, and everyone has a different one. One day we'll know the truth.

Quote:

it is a fact that its style is not one of disinterested history, and its ambiguity is due to intentional literary traits rather than the mysteriousness of the subject matter

This doesn't make much sense to me.

Another note about Netheril.

I COULD be wrong but did Mystra not send visions of the Fall of Netheril to her highest ranking priestesses to tell of it's fall, specifically TO make sure the story got told?

I can say with almost 100% certainty the Religious followers of Garagos keep no records of his time as Targus. Mostly because from what I understand the god isn't even aware of his former incarnation.

Kudrak: it means that the authors of the story were not interested in recording history as it happened. They were interested in relating an ethical and theological message. In Christian terms, it's Kerygma. The moral of the story is not to aspire to divinity but rather accept your place as human; in a sense it's a repetition of the exile from paradise, only now the perspective is an entire society as opposed to the individual. We can only understand the birth of the myth if we put it into the proper historical context, and understand the symbolic meaning of Babylon to (maybe) 5th century Jews BCE. Just compare it to the historical works of the OT, like Nehemiah, 1. Maccabees or even the few historical remnants of Kings. The style is completely different. The Bible does provide some remarkably accurate information at times, but it's always through the scope of theology. Today's scholarship can clearly show the story is extremely unlikely, so there should be no question about that. It's among the later tradition of the OT (prophets and Deuteronomistic history is probably older), and of course it's historically inaccurate. We have absolutely no evidence outside the story itself to assume it happened. But that's not the interesting part. What's interesting is that there's no reason to assume the original writers, readers, redactors and canonizers thought it was historically accurate. This kind of Biblical fundamentalism is a minority that has become trendy at different times in history (including some radical protestantism today, especially in the Anglo-American world), but it has never been the mainstream interpretation. No serious Bibilical scholar takes the myths of Genesis literally, and neither does any major orthodox church. Patristic literature often uses allegorical interpretation, too.

The Bible certainly doesn't boil down to personal interpretation. It's a historical and religious document as any other, and it must be studied with the same methods and assumptions as the history of Assyrian or Scandinavian religion. You could theoretically make different claims based on some personal religious view, but you must realize they'd be worthless and incomprehensible to others in an impartial, rational and scientific discussion. This is so off-topic that it hurts, but I'm happy to take this to its own topic if you're interested.

Grymia: I don't know about that, but it's very possible. The Chosen of Mystra certainly know, and it's possible they've spread the knowledge. Do you have any idea where you read it?

Selvec: you're right about Garagos, but he's one of many. Every Netherese god is worshiped today, and only Moander is really dead (only recently). However, if you look at any polytheistic religion in the real world you'll find a rich mythology. Myths of Targus would surely have passed down in other churches, because he was one of a small pantheon whose gods probably interacted with eachother in mythology. If Targus was still somehow Targus (or remembered as Targus) when Tempus defeated him, it's also feasible that these stories would have passed down in the church of Tempus. Either way, there's every reason to assume we have more sources about ancient Netheril than we do about ancient Babylon or Greece. Every other reason aside, Netheril simply had a higher literacy rate than ancient Earth cultures, and better ways of keeping recrods. They produced more text and therefore more potential sources to survive to date, quite simply.

Koragi Mydnite wrote:

It's...in the Abyss. You can't walk to the Abyss, from my understanding. If that's what you meant.

Glyph wrote:

the abyss is a different plane, so you can't walk there from cordor. that said you can reach a way there by foot and not relying on pre-binded portals.

Waaaaay late on the replies, but essentially yes. I was wondering if you can even get to Zashibon or if it 'exists but you can never go there'.

Zanshibon is the name of the city in the Abyss, yes.

So... is that a 'Yes, it's in the Abyss and somehow you can get there'? Cause I do know that there is a way to get there, or so I've OOCly heard.
I've just been curious about that city since I read about it lol

....ask ICly?

lol

Well I figure if I can get there ICly, I eventually will. None of my characters have heard of the city right now, so there's no IC reason for them to ask or know of it suddenly XD

IronAngel wrote:

Selvec: you're right about Garagos, but he's one of many. Every Netherese god is worshiped today, and only Moander is really dead (only recently). However, if you look at any polytheistic religion in the real world you'll find a rich mythology. Myths of Targus would surely have passed down in other churches, because he was one of a small pantheon whose gods probably interacted with eachother in mythology. If Targus was still somehow Targus (or remembered as Targus) when Tempus defeated him, it's also feasible that these stories would have passed down in the church of Tempus. Either way, there's every reason to assume we have more sources about ancient Netheril than we do about ancient Babylon or Greece. Every other reason aside, Netheril simply had a higher literacy rate than ancient Earth cultures, and better ways of keeping recrods. They produced more text and therefore more potential sources to survive to date, quite simply.

Maybe. We have had this discussion before however, and so I'll leap straight to the eventual conclusion that it's up to the players xD.
I don't think he was Targus at the time of defeat, likely because Targus was one of the strongest gods at the Time, one of the reasons Shar used him. Nothing in the DnD books under Garagos or Tempus in 1.0 2.0 or 3.0/5 suggesting Garagos was defeated till after his fall. Which makes a lot of sense due to the above mentioned reasons.

without giving anything away, and incase you haven't already followed the above advice, the abyss is pretty well known in this setting all things considered, shouldn't take a massive mission to discover more ingame =D

the second expansion goes into some detail about Netheril aswell, if you want to check that out for a feel of the place I would suggest busting open chapter 2 via the command text files and take a wander with a reasonably high level pc. bare in mind however you can't apply -that- story to amia, its just interesting for a wander in the 'past' of the forgotten realms =D

ed; also yus I did mean via portal wand in the previous comment I made, my grammar sucks.

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