On Building Settlements and Surviving Veltrona

Summary

Veltrona is not a simple world to build a thriving civilization upon. More than just raw land resources, there are unique challenges that must be addressed, or a downfall will result. It is a testament to those who faced these problems head on and thrived, while so many others fell to ruin. On its face, the nature of these issues is fairly straightforward, but people are ever scheming. Sometimes they are their own downfall more often than anything Veltrona itself threw at them.   There are five broad aspects that should be looked at in this regard: location and available resources, the Relentless Herds and Packs, the Forsaken, the tempestuous weather, and magic itself.    

Location and Available Resources

Farmland's in the south, forests in the north. Cleared out the west and east, 'swhy we're called the Break City. They come from the north and break upon our walls, or Aerintor help those farmers run flashin' quick.

— A Captain of the Guard for Break City, a minor fortress city in northern Aerthen.

  A fairly mundane but nonetheless critical consideration: what is available for exploitation. Food and water are paramount, and Veltrona's rich wildernesses provide both in abundance. It is in fact more noteworthy where there isn't food and water than is. For example, Sa-kemet, Zahmal, Varnkof, Eylia, Fauverngarz, and similar continental areas are primarily 'deserts'. While it is not impossible to survive within them, they do not provide for civilizations very easily unless one is near coastlines. The inverse of this problem are places like Etzli Cuauhtla and Jerhegn, which are so rich with life they are overwhelmingly dangerous and filled with Relentless.   Inter-connectivity is a backbone aspect of effective civilization growth. Roadways, secure passages, and any way to travel without encountering dangers are highly coveted. Choice locations matter all the more, as finding these stable routes is simple; maintaining them, much harder. The vast stretches that can emerge between settlements is hard to understate, and every mile of road is magnitudes more work in maintaining its readiness.   With all this in mind, locations are usually chosen more for their defensibility. High grounds, favorable cliff sides, tight valleys, and similar areas that afford easy fortifying. The faster and more sturdy defenses can go up, the easier they will endure the incoming Relentless. However, such places can easily become deathtraps when surrounded, or hit with especially heinous weather. There are those who instead chose harder areas and focused more on their own fortifying skills than relying upon the veltron to provide. Regardless, a defensible location is a hallmark of a successful city. Those that are not in such are either quite temporary or defended by a larger, external force such as an army.    

The Relentless

A wall's the most reliable thing a place can have. The stupid ones ram straight into it, and the smarter ones go crazy trying to climb it. Sure they'll get over eventually, but if they built a bigger wall I'd be out a job!

— A huntress mercenary working wall duty in Lophern.

  Where there are people, the Relentless will come, always and eventually. Hate them, curse them, cry and rage against fate, they will come all the same. So it is to survive upon Veltrona is to confront the Relentless, and overcome them as tirelessly as they attack. No settlement of any kind upon the veltron will go ignored, and so one must have warriors ready to do such battle. While they are thankfully not terribly innovative, the Relentless only need to win once: people need to win every time. The weight of this realization can be quite terrible indeed to bear.   Compared to people, the means of attack for Relentless are simple. Mundane fortifications of walls, raised veltron, dug trenches, spike traps, and the like can do much to blunt their offensive. However, as there is usually so many of them, their bodies come to clog the fortifications, jamming up more delicate pieces as they stomp over each other. Hence, there is a trade off in durability versus expected usage where fortifications are concerned.   The greatest of all possible options, however, are walls. Meters upon meters of thick stone, wood, reinforcement, and however tall it can be made, the better. These heavy investments return pound-for-pound the greatest effective way of blunting the Relentless. Terrain permitting, all kinds of Relentless are forced to fight the wall, in trying to ram it apart or climb over it. Countless amounts of their bodies are broken in the attempt, only to become a meaty ramp that others might yet succeed in using. Even a minor and ill-repaired wall can do much work, and so every settlement worth living in will have a wall of some kind. Those that do not usually flee to places that do.   That being said, there is a possibility in blunting or even stopping Relentless assaults before they begin. It takes time for herds or packs to form up threateningly, and these immature groups are vastly easier to deal with. In regular culling, their terrifying might can be stymied and so settlements of all kinds kept safer and easier. With such vast wildernesses, however, it is not a guaranteed way of keeping the Relentless at bay. Eventually, very large herds or packs from farther away may migrate, and so bring ruin with them.   While it may read that the Relentless attack every other day or some alarming frequency, that is normally not the case. Relentless attack in relation to how dense and life rich an area is; there must be animals for there to be Relentless. The larger and greater an assault of theirs is, the longer it takes for a reformation to occur. Its observably in line with population replacement rates. That is, Relentless will never seemingly cause mass extinctions in nature with their attacks. Some, as a result, have tried mass culling of animals as a 'solution', but the ecological and economical damage of this is staggering.   In the end, the Relentless still come anyway from elsewhere all the same.    

The Forsaken

Listen, it's real easy for you to talk that way when all you've read is a (ineligible) book. You go out there, you smell the rot, you hear the bemoaning, you listen to them crying about how they died. Listen to a man hunting for the ones who (redacted) him to death, laughing at his pain. It ain't (expletive removed) easy not getting as angry as they are sometimes.

— An infamous interview with a Corpsehunter working in Temu.

  It is sometimes the case people are often their own worst enemies, and chief among them stand the Forsaken. Whether it be the vengeful undead or the malevolent living who'd plunged head-first into evil, they are a uniquely dangerous and frightening enemy to confront. Possessed of intelligence (sometimes), access to magic, and a unique endurance to rival the Relentless, they are an enormous threat. While grouped under a singular moniker, there are two chief categories as mentioned: the undead, and the forsakened living.   The undead are the most common kind of Forsaken, and nominally the idea everything thinks of when hearing about 'Forsaken'. Whether left unburied, unremembered, or hateful grudges yet sated, the undead are those who have died and come back. All these returned harbor powerful regrets, some overtly malicious, others simply seeking closure. Graceful are those who find a suitable ending, returning to a peaceful death. For everyone else, hate is the inevitable result. This is what drives them on to kill the living, to seek vengeance even for ideas they've long forgotten about.   Because of how they emerge, undead can show up anywhere people are. A person who dies an unbecoming death is not guaranteed to return, but its certainly hedging a terrible bet. Settlements where many die in poverty, hunger, disease, or other maladies are often beset by the vengeful dead the most. If left unchecked, these undead violently murder the living, engendering more undead, and so the hateful spiral erupts in a frighteningly short time. Whole cities, once thriving, were consumed from the inside out because of negligence in handling the undead.   Unlike many other threats, the Forsaken undead are truly random. As they result the most from horrible mistreatment, a well-functioning society is normally unaffected by them. An occasional one is to be expected, but not the terrible waves often feared of. However, become lax in standing vigilant for them and one is only inviting trouble. How to answer this problem is a deeply cultural one, and so there is no real universal answer. Funerary rites as a whole are very important, though, as it helps to pacify the dead and give them a peaceful rest. They are, even if broken or misshapen in their minds, people, and so want closure.   Then there are the forsakened living, beings who embody any idea that is 'evil' in its entirety. They are people who have turned away from their societies, pursuing profane paths to power, lust, greed, and whatever compulsive desires they have. It must be understood they are far beyond just being 'outside the norm'; they are actively malevolent, not unlike cancer in a healthy body. They exist to consume and increase their own, and there is nothing they will not do in order to fulfill this. Such is the thinking that ultimately gave birth to beings like the Vampires.   Some argue that more than any other threat, these forsakened living are the greatest problems. Intelligent, insidious, and capable of planning like any other person, they will unmake an entire civilization if it means gaining something for themselves. There is no real singular solution to them; they are an active and ever on going threat that must be addressed. How to do so is truly varied, and it is not simple to answer with something as banal as 'good morals and ethics'. One cannot reason with the Relentless, for they are ever hungry for people. Similarly, the forsakened living will feed people to sate their hunger, whatever it really is.    

The Tempestuous Weather

Here's the ear muffs and the rope. What's the rope for? So you don't go flying away, of course. Guess you've heard loud wind before!

— A mistress carpenter working in the reaches of Aochen.

  From light rains to winds so fast your skin can be ripped off, the vast range of weathers is Veltrona's fitness test for everything that lives upon it. It must be said that location is a great determiner of many kinds of weather. Picking somewhere with 'reasonable' weather is quite important, and often makes for very coveted areas people wage wars to own. Sometimes less defensible places will be chosen simply to better endure the storms that will eventually happen.   Compensating for this architecturally ends up becoming a great challenge. For example, enduring heavy rainfall that can lead to flooding has all sorts of implications. A walled city needs some way of not suffering structure damage and dispensing the excess water safely. However, their defenses need to do this and be ready for the Relentless, so it is not a matter of simple valves or drainage pipes. Similarly, the infrastructure needs to resist sabotage efforts from rebels, forsaken, and other crafty individuals.   One fairly ubiquitous innovation is the stormwall: utilizing solid materials to create a shield against wind currents. By placing vulnerable buildings in the 'shade' of the wall, the most serious effects can be mitigated in full or partially. Mindfully as its a wall and not a dome, there are some angles that remain exposed to wind currents coming in from other directions. Combined with some specific architectural reinforcement, though, and one can have a fairly solid building situation. Since stormwalls also serve the dual purpose of physical protection, it is a lovely intersection of multiple needs being met at once.   Thankfully, once adjusted for, weather is perhaps the more solvable of any problems a city faces. There is the constant need for maintenance and possible erosion to deal with, but such is a matter of course. However, building up that kind of infrastructure is not cheap, and new buildings or repairs are correspondingly expensive. To some degree, this encourages a culture of long-term construction techniques and more economized space design.    

Magic

Listen, as long as nothing disturbs the temperature balancers it won't–

— The purported last words of a fire mage working the central boiling station of a city in Varnkof.

  For semantic clarity, common vernacular tends to call a lot of things relating to mana as 'magic'. Magic storms, magic catastrophes, magic water, so on. This is not technically correct, as magic is the 'art of manipulating mana', and events derived or powered by environmental mana is not 'magic'. The only people who really care about this are scholars and mages, so for everyone else, its magic problems.   A sort of catchall problem to deal with, magic can be anything from fire-breathing hummingbirds to bizarre, gravity-inverting waves. This is almost entirely dependent on the local area of a given settlement, as one near the ocean won't have to worry about fire. Flooding, of course, but not fire usually. Similarly those in the mountains will have much wind and veltron activity, the latter usually stony eruptions rather than quakes. But, Veltrona is a temperamental world, and so unexpected types of weather or animals can emerge.   Natural forces aside, people armed with magic is a far more regular and recurrent problem. Magical skill manifests in many ways, but the type of magic and the skill of the user determines how much of a problem they are. Even the least capable fire mage can create a spark, and the right spark can cause truly incredible damage. However, a water mage that barely makes a sprinkle is unremarkable, unless one needs pure drinking water. Wind mages are valued if they can divert dangerous winds; failing that, creating fresh air or moving toxic air, such as in a swamp or kiln. Veltron mages that can reinforce buildings or do ground work are universally desirable. So on, so forth.   These capable people are usually filtered into various useful niches. Those that wield war-capable power become a unique problem unto themselves. A single person wielding the destructive power dozens, hundreds, and even thousands could manage is a stunning proposition indeed. Those that choose to rebel, commit crimes, or otherwise rapidly become city-crippling problems, and so order enforcement becomes that much more serious. Conversely, entire companies of such individuals can wield untoward amounts of influence with the threat of their force.   Combined with the potential of these individuals arising in any social strata, and instability is very easy to follow. How to solve this is a complex issue, and one year's suitable answer can fall apart next year. Power demands even greater responsibility, something often not taught nor learned before it's too late. As civilizations advance and their technology improves, the damage such upstarts can cause can become paralyzing with great ease. Understandably, the answers some come to on this matter become increasingly extreme as a result.   Like sitting on a lid of boiling water, however, if not done carefully it will invariably explode all the same.    

Conclusion

Contextualizing the nuances of these problems is not a simple matter. They can also read as perhaps overbearingly problematic, but if that were the case, Veltrona would be depopulated quite fast. One may come to wonder, "If this world is so dangerous, then surely violent or militaristic societies are the norm?". Surprisingly, not really. Although they do better in the short term, one must be capable of managing people as well. So it is, the need to survive versus the need to prosper is that much more stark of a matter.   When it comes to building and managing how they live, one can begin to envision the requirements they must meet.