The primary idea for the geography of this world came from Ursala K. LeQuin's Earth Sea books. Oceana is mostly an ocean world with lots of small islands similar to Ursala K. LeQuin's Earth Sea books or the BESM setting book Uresia: Grave of Heaven. The social, political and technology is not from the Earth Sea books, but from a wide variety of sources.
Oceana is a high magic to medium magic society with most people actually being low power. It is also a world of more ordinary dangers rather than extremely powerful creatures. Opponents, including monsters, are dangerous not because the monster is inherantly powerful, but because the monster such as an Orc has levels in character classes and there are lots of monsters. I don't particularly like worlds where the characters can save the world against a clearly defined evil, such as Lord of the Rings or similar high fantasy. Oceana has no obvious world threatening dangers that can be defeated by direct combat with a BBEG (Big Bad Evil Genius). There are powerful artifacts that threaten society occasionally, but most of the threats are much more mundane.
The major threats to human-centric civilization are the monsters such as Orcs that threaten to over run civilization. This has more in common with late Roman Empire and the barbarian hordes than it does to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. I prefer the party will have to more than just kill opponents to defeat what threatens their civilization. The various monster tribes are gaining ground. Many tribes are getting bigger and population pressure leads them to raid demi-human settlements more.
Oceana Time Line Tables
- Text version Master Time Line
- 1200 BCE to 0000 BCE (very long table)
- 0000 CE to 1000 CE (very long table)
- 1000 CE to 1500 CE (very long table)
- 1500 CE to 2000 CE (very long table)
- 2000 CE to Present
- Earth History Timeline (comparisian purposes)
Human & Allies
Monsters
Oceana City, Town and Village
I have changed the way I catagalog my sources from an earlier version. Now all the science fiction and fantasy books that have given me inspiration for any gaming world are listed on a single set of pages. I found that the worlds I want to build use the same books, even though the setting is very different. It also means that people that want to get inside my head to figure out plots have a lot more material to read.
Real world research for Oceana, RPG sources and Oceana specific SF&F is still listed as before.