Redeeming Jakandor

File: Jakandor, Isle of Destiny.jpg (55KB, 451x579px) Image search: [Google]

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So you may be wondering how they managed to screw up the Charonti? Well, this review here gives us the full skinny, but in a nutshell, the book seems to keep waffling on about what the Charonti actually are.

"The Charonti have a caste system; only not really. They are hidebound by tradition, ritual and cultural manifest destiny; except when being wholly rational and pragmatic. They're a culture of atheist necromancers; except all the ones who aren't (i.e.: the vast majority). Priests and Outcasts are reviled and hunted; except the ones who decide to fit in. The Charonti are a dying race fighting for survival in the ruins of their former greatness; but what they're besieged by is never made clear."

http://vaultsofnagoh.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/jakandor-last-sandbox.html

Step 1 in redeeming Jakandor is, obviously, to make them clearer.

Step 2? Fix up the mechanical crunch. Again, our reviewer offers a scathing outline of what's wrong:

"he fearsome thaumaturgical plague that destroyed Charonti civilisation is anything but fearsome and can, in fact, be cured by a cheap alchemical mixture. The mighty and terrible necromantic servitors are just bog-standard 1HD skeletons and zombie with silly names. Even the unique magical constructs are yawnsome. Zeppelins made of whale bones, mummified ancestor head libraries, or giant necromantic digging machines made boring? An achievement in itself. And the class kits (you remember these, front-loaded modifications to the existing AD&D classes...) are dull beyond the dreams of accountants. There's a scribe kit for Gygax' sake! Kits take up more than a score of pages in the book, and they could have been dispatched in two."

File: Jakandor, Island of War.jpg (49KB, 453x578px) Image search: [Google]

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Now, as for the Knorr... from where I stand, there's three things we need to do to make them work:

Firstly, make them less boring. They're pretty damn paint-by-the-numbers.

Secondly, make them make more SENSE. Seriously, the holy vengeance thing and counting coup is just stupid.

Finally, make them actually sympathetic; when the purported morally gray setting has their own sourcebook admit "Yeah, we're bloodthirsty barbarian invaders who want to kill the natives for not being war-worshipping primitives like us", something's gone fucking wrong.

So... does nobody have any ideas? Anybody? Come on, I thought this'd be right up /tg/'s alley...

I liked it. To me the whole thing kept running up against 2nd Edition's awkward mechanics. I didn't get the feeling the Knorr was the bad guys, but I was sympathetic to the Charonti.

The Charonti see themselves as rational but in reality they aren't. They see the caste system as naturally reflecting people's abilities. Their priests are gnostic philosophers rather than the sort of priest that is usual in D+D.

The true threat is outlined in the 3rd book. From memory it was a group of shadowy monsters that were never really explained.

>>54698868
Fourth thing: name them after something other than instant soup packets.

>>54700656
yo,
oldfag here. i played some Jakandor back in '99. The Charonti make sense when you don't have sessions thought out with 2010+ complexity.
these guys pretty much ran a DungeonCrawl in the outside air with more banter and a few items of plot that made the missions/dungeons make sense.
life was simpler back then.

also, Terese Nielsen's art is goddess level.
i hope she has bounty and fortune for her graceful renditions.

>>54702308
Do you mean the Charonti, or the Knorr, because my complaints are mostly about the Knorr.

>>54702255
Well, actually, that's part of the reason I started this thread. I think Jakandor could be a pretty sweet conversion to 5e, if /tg/'s willing to get its homebrewing on.

>>54698543
>>54698816
>>54698868
No offense, and I appreciate your spirit here, but this just really sounds like a shitty version of Glorantha. And so my advice for fixing it would be: use Glorantha instead. Glorantha is already more or less the best possible version of this thing that exists.

>>54698868
That girl holding the scythes in that pose looks so silly.

This sounds almost like a Fire and Ice campaign setting.

>>54705592
No offense taken or intended, but... what the hell are you talking about? How does this remote island-nation torn between barbarian invaders and the wizardly natives sound even remotely like Glorantha?

>>54698543
Huh, I'm actually not familiar with this setting at all. It seems like It could definitely be interesting

>>54698816
The Charonti would pretty much need a re-write from the ground up imo if they're really as poorly defined as the review lets on.

What if, though in the past they were characterized by a devotion to rationality and pragmatism, the slow decay of their civilization wore at their lofty scientific ideals and started to speed their downfall. They slowly over time drift further from their old selves, becoming fearful authoritarian dogmatists, they develop a rigid caste system which they rely on to maintain any semblance of order. Though it is part of their culture from long ago that they have no gods, because of their already long crumbling world many(though far from the majority) have taken to worshipping gods, starting cults, and other transgressive acts in secret, creating a whole underground of dispossesed individuals. Maybe some have even taken to worshipping their ancestors themselves, deifying them rather than constantly calling on their long dead souls to guide them.

The aristocracy relies on necromancy as their only true access to the knowledge and wisdom of their past, but in fact it is their universal use of necromancy that has been eating at them from their core. Something like that. Perhaps their continuous usage of such over centuries has deteriorated the souls of their own ancestors, and they've grown restless. Maybe the big bad evil waiting at their door is actually an army of their past, come to seek the rest they've been denied for centuries. That and maybe like, lifelong use of necromancy and prolonging their own lives eats at their sanity or something like that, explaining the slowly decaying ethics of the aristocracy. So we maintain that they are fractured, but we can set clearer boundaries.

>>54708520
>>54698868
I can see a few possibilities for the Knorr off the top of my head. First would be something along the lines of, the Knorr are nature worshipping and very in tune to the fey. Maybe the Charonti have some kind of Princess Mononoke-esque plot to revive their dying civilization and escape the wrath of whatever it is they're afraid of. Maybe they're out to kill an archfey of some kind, or they go full Isengard and start annihilating the landscape to build crazy machines and magical devices and junk like that. The Charonti artistocracy are doing anything in their power so they can live forever, figuratively and literally. They're noble in that they want to save their culture, but they refuse to change in light of their circumstances and have no thrown out their last shred of humanity in a desperate attempt to cling to the past.

The Knorr could be vanguards of the fey, or just nature itself. Perhaps while the Charonti are ignorant of the great threat that lurks beyond, the Knorr already know of what's coming, and believe they must destroy the Charonti once and for all to protect themselves and the natural world. Kind of generic I know, but i'm kinda doing this stream of consciousness right now. It could make for some interesting characters maybe, there could be Knorr who see the destruction of the Charonti as wrong or unnecessary, but the majority refuse to take the chance.

Maybe the underground groups within the Charonti could learn of the Knorr's presence and actually begin to try and communicate with them. Add some intrigue to everything rather than just have a flat out team 1 vs. team 2 situation.