Master Terari wrote:
But what if he's not making it up? What if there really is a place known among Alphatians as Ploo, populated by so-called "chicken people"? Could it be a home of the Gyerians, either on Alphatia or the Isle of Dawn (there is a gyerian in the novel Son of Dawn who is found around the IoD with his dwarf companion).
I know that all their villages are supposedly named Gyer (silly), but what if their kingdoms are named Ploo? Or perhaps Ploo is a legendary gyerian kingdom.
Nice!
Some thoughts:
The Gyerian in Son of Dawn is named HeyYou and has basically been adopted by Hoganvar Stonetalker, a dwarf from Denwarf Hurgon. This does support your idea of such a kingdom being located in Alphatia or on the IoD.
OTOH, LoZompatore once posted a map showing Gyerian settlements north of Hule. This could also be a possible location for Ploo.
Gyerians are semi-nomadic so the word Gyer probably just means "Camp" or something similar. It could give us some naming ideas though; perhaps the capital of Ploo is called "High Gyer" or something ;)
AC9 states that Gyerians make their semi-permanent dwellings on plains or in woodlands and that they generally stay away from humans, but get along with elves. This could also provide some clues to the location of a Gyer Kingdom.
Well spotted!
Havard
I'd love to reread it 17 years later, but I think it's on 5 and a quarter inch floppies and needs a commodore 64 computer to read...I once wrote up an article for submission to Dragon about the Chicken people of Ploo. Needless to say it didn't make it in
Oh, I would love to see it! Do you remember anything about it? Anything usable in connection with the ideas in this thread?
Havard
Perhaps Gyerian is a corruption of Ghyran or vice versa.
Of course all this probably goes against canon - must check.
Regards
Mortis
Oh, I would love to see it! Do you remember anything about it? Anything usable in connection with the ideas in this thread?
Havard
I remember it being very tongue in cheek, and perhaps a bit more monty python influenced than anything else! I think it even followed the gazeteer style, when I'm back in scotland at christmas I'll have a search for it! I do remember an artifact that was an inflated red rubber glove worn on the head...
Agathokles suggested to consider the chicken people of Ploo as a subrace of Gyerian: notice how many different pictures the "average" Gyerian has in the various modules (see for example AC9 and Mystara Monstrous Compendium Appendix); so there might be many Gyerian subraces, not alike to what we have for lupins and rakastas.
For example, the people of Ploo would be chicken-Gyerian, while other subraces scattered around the world would be more birdlike-Gyerian, and so on.
You may also guess that these subraces originated from a common ancestor that was able to fly and spread throughout the world, but soon after it lost the ability to fly and many groups became isolated from each other, creating different Gyerian breeds.
As regards the people of Ploo, when we discussed it in the IMG, I tried to give them some typical features. It's a rather weird stuff, see if you like it:
I placed the chicken people (CP in the following) somewhere in the plains just NE of Esterhold, along the Alphatian borders but north of Jen, to better explain why the Alphatians did not expand along that direction.
Considering their chicken-like nature, the people of Ploo live in chaotic "towns" made of heavily stack up mud and wood huts, without a proper city planning or commodities of any sort. They do a little farming, but most of their diet is made of hunting and gathering in the sourrounding wilderness (they are omnivorous, what else?). They collect some values and can do a little trading but their culture is nearly primordial.
The CP society is made of a very strict hierarchy (like the real word chicken society). Almost every single chicken person has a direct superior or inferior member. You might think to it as a caste system where each caste is made by a single individual. The higher rainking individuals have access to better food supplies and can eat before their inferior members, but in turn they must give way to their superiors.
The people of Ploo constantly struggle against each other (by quarreling and intimidating, and broiling) in order to climb their class system.
A single CP family is very prolific and it may have many, many children, but most of them never grow old due to accidents, predators, illnesses, quarrelings and the occasional "war" against the neighbours (which include the Alphatians, the Jennites, the Thonian and the other Ploo city states as well).
A CP "war" against two CP clans is a barbaric rush against each other, ruled by fear: the side that routes first lose the battle. CP, as you may guess, are highly emotional guys, and they flee in the forest as soon as possible when things go worse (or when they just think that things are going worse). A CP clan can disperse and live on in the wilderness for a certain amount of time before gathering again and building a new settlement: their towns are extremely expendible and easily rebuildable, and their high birth rate prevents clan extinction. This also makes the CP very difficult to uproot from a place with standard warfare.
Terari speaks about the slaughtering of a whole Alphatian family (made of possibly accomplished magic user) by "hands" of the people of Ploo, so these CP should have some power able to counteract the Alphatians magical skills.
For this reason I gave them a kind of "random personal anti magic shield". Each chicken-person is permanently sourrounded by a weird anti magic shield, that acts as a natural power and that the chicken person is not able to control at all. This shield acts randomly; when it is hit by a spell (any spell) it is triggered and it does one of these three things:
1) Nothing (the spell works as usual)
2) Anti magic shield (the spell is canceled)
3) The spell is mirrored to the caster (or in a random direction, if possible) like the original spell but the point of origin of the mirrored spell starts from the original target.
Thanks to this power any magic user army attempting to harass a CP community might suffer heavy losses due to "friendly fire", and so winning a battle against CP might be a difficult task even for an Alphatian mixed army. The same power prevents the chicken people to properly learn magical or clerical spell (offensive spells are just too risky, while healing/divination/defensive spells might not work for most of the time).
;)
On another matter, Havard remembers well about my map: I placed the Gyerians in the plains north of Hule basically because I set in the NW Black Mountains the Tarlyon elves community from CM5 module "Mystery of the snow pearls". From this module we know that there is a Gyerian town close to the Tarlyon village, and that Gyerians inhabits it for half a year coming from the plains of the west (not shown in the CM5 map). The plains north of Hule seemed to me the best place for them.