Channel Cities:About
From Channel Cities
The goal with this site is to provide a heavily detailed Role Playing Game (RPG) setting that is free for the public to use in a non-commercial way. This includes using information here as the background and setting for RPG’s that they may run as a GM or DM. With RPG’s intended as an interactive story where the players play the part or role of a character in a story, a natural possible use is for people to use it as a setting for stories that they want to write. As with any publicly available wiki, please read our User Agreement, which details the copyright rules under which this site operates. Any and all commercial use of material from this web site, must have the expressed written permission of all parties who own the copyright to material used within any commercial products that are based on the Channel Cities and World of Ærnth setting.
The original intent with the setting was to create a medieval fantasy city setting that had a gritty feel, in which there was a lot of political, economic, and social intrigue for adventurers to experience. This originated with a gaming group that I was a part of back in high-school and included Mike C. Sean S., Mike R., Adrian M. and Darrin M. I had purchased a couple of commercially available city settings that I was severely disappointed in, and wanted something that was more realistic and believable, yet still had the magical fantasy feel to it. So I created a small city setting back in 1984 that used the name Clearwater.
Towards the end of high school and in college (1986-1990) I did a lot of research on medieval population’s densities of cities as well as the economics and food needs to support such populations. The city started out as a large trade center name Clearwater (which later became a small town in another part of the world as the setting grew), then it grew into something more and by the early 1990’s had become a group of cities called the Channel Cities. By this time other small areas of the world around the Channel Cities had also been detailed (Clearwater became a small town of the Archendurn Kingdom). Finally (mid 1990’s) a world map and historical timeline were put together with only basic details of many more kingdoms as well as past and present empires being named and put into place, along with a wide range of world and cultural details for the various locations and peoples of this world. However I found that there was lots of room for others to contribute to this fantasy RPG world, so I started keeping track of these contributions as best as I could and continued to document and detail more of the world myself along side of the work done by others. The first of this was in the late 1980’s when a friend and fellow gamer (Patrick F.) that was participating in a campaign that I was running suggested himself taking a portion of the city as it was at that time and detailing it to also run a campaign in the same city setting. Years later (1997) he encouraged me to start up an email based campaign in the setting (which had grown even larger by then), which lasted about three years before I got so busy with other things that I didn’t have much time to commit to it anymore.
The setting currently resides in several locations, including several ring binders (more than 1,000 pages), two index card organizer boxes of NPC’s (~1,000), and a 314 page (and growing) Word document. Thus there is a lot of work ahead of me to get even a portion of the current material entered, however the World of Ærnth and the dark maze of streets that make up its hub, the Channel Cities are huge places with lots of room for more places, people, and other details to be added.
Our hope now is to also allow others to contribute to the setting by adding details and ideas, to help grow it into the largest and most complete RPG setting available (with most of the info being free for non-commercial use). Thus unlike some other large settings where there are expensive books to buy, most of the details of the Channel Cities and the World of Ærnth are freely available to use in RPG’s.
