Gæa is our groups home grown world. The name is hardly original, but it works. Gæa started out as a continent which one of our players (Carol) drew up when our RQ group got back together after a long role playing drought. Using Coral Draw, she took the outline of Germany, reversed the image and transposed mountains, rivers, borders, country names and the like onto it. It was a bit of a rush job, but Carol is very talented, so even her rush job looked great and had a nice fantasy feel to it.
Some of the country names were straight out of novels (Drasnia – The Belgeraid, by David Eddings) and real life places. (Faerie Glen is actually a suburb of Pretoria, South Africa – really cool name for a fantasy place as well). It was a lovely setting and we quickly notched up numerous adventures there. As time went by, we replaced plagiarized names – Drasnia became Dalatia etc. Many unnamed features were fleshed out, the huge mountain range in the North became the Northice Mountains and we even found a place far to the south to situate Elderad, The Lost City (A RuneQuest module).
I am never content with what is available. I needed a place for my favorite creatures, Lizard Men. So some more continents and islands sprung up, Araktor, Vasniss, The Misty Isles, The Tinn Isles, Illium Cromia to mention but a few.
Gæa retained its name but we needed to name the world, so we ended up with a continent of Gaia on the world of Gæa. Maps were drawn and re drawn (by hand, with MS Paint, Campaign Cartographer (free demo) and eventually Autorealm, a shareware package which is written in Delphi).
The original Coral Draw map of Gaia was lost during a PC rebuild, but we still have the paper printout. Histories were written, gods dreamed up and this process still continues.
As existing material is rehashed to make sure its fits and new material is written, it will be published here. The maps will be redone again before they are published as some basic rules of geography and cartography were broken and need to be remedied. (E.G.: There are way too many jungle areas at latitudes which should not warrant that sort of vegetation.)
As always, criticisms and comments are welcome. Even if you pick up something like a name or concept which appears to be the work of someone else, let us know. We have read so many books and played so many games that sometimes ideas and names which we consider original are far from it! As such, we would hate to be thought of as pinching other peoples ideas and/or work.
This article was last updated XIX August MMII