LetsBuild5e:Questions

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Politics and Society

How do thieves' guilds fit into the setting?

(Question from Metal Fatigue)

1: Every city has one; they enforce a monopoly on crime by means of violence.
2: Some cities have organized thieves' guilds, while others do not.
3: "Guild" is a misnomer—they're more like criminal gangs, competing for territory.
4: Most crime is unorganized, with gangs or "guilds" covering only specific rackets (such as protection).

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History and Mythology

What are the names of the gods and heroes of legend?

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Coming soon

History and Mythology

How universal are historical/legendary figures?

1: Every culture has its own, with no obvious relations between them.
2: Every culture has several unique cultural figures, but there are a few that have obvious parallels in other cultures.
3: Most cultural figures have obvious analogs in other cultures, though with different names and often different roles.
4: Essentially all cultural figures are shared. Though each culture has their own names for them, their roles in the stories and histories are basically the same.
5: All cultures have the same cultural figures, right down to the same names.

What legendary artefacts are believed to exist?

• The trappings of the old empire: the weapons and armour of the emperor, presumably something suitably archaic (to the current era) like a bronze spear and shield.
  
• The original seat of power - a stone of Scone type deal.
  
• The dwarven map of the underworld which they used to travel during the last flip - carved into a series of stone tablets and sealed into an ark of the covenant style casket.
  
• The legendary halfling cornucopia - which they say fed them during a time of famine.
  
• The elven compass - the only one known in this setting which magically charts the route to the safe way to navigate the falls at the edge. Currently kept on board the flagship of the elven boat-city.
  
• The original tome in which the folk hero wrote the words stolen from the divine tongue. Kept locked away as just to look upon those words will drive most mortals insane.
  
• Sacred items of the dragonborn, said to come from the hoard of the last true dragon (many counterfeit items also exist, only certain dragonborn priests know how to tell the real from the fake artifacts).
  
• A magical conch shell, said to be the first ever musical instrument & held in the main bardic college in the country where wayehi hails from. It is said that if you hold it to your ear you can hear the echoes of the song that created the world, but also that if you blow on it in a time of great need then the ghost of one of the great folk heroes will appear to guide you.
  
• The girdle of the Trickster. Appears to be a simple rope belt. Magical identification reveals it to be a cursed belt of gender changing. In fact it is neither of these and putting on the belt actually has the same effect as if a card were picked at random from a Deck of Many Things (the gender changing ID is actually an epic level casting of Nystul's Magical Aura with Permanancy).
  

Geography

What sort of natural resources are there?

1: Strictly ones found on Earth: wood, iron, marble, etc.
2: Mostly mundane resources, but there are one or two unusual and special ones as well - orichalcum, magic crystals, never-cooling lava, whatever.
3: Mundane resources exist, but they also have magical versions scattered about - iron has cold iron deposits mixed in, there are "dryad oak" trees that are unusually tough/self-regenerating, and so on.
4: There are mundane resources and a whole bunch of special resources that aren't necessarily tied to a mundane type - all of the examples from 2, and more, can be found and utilized.
5: There are mundane resources, magical variants of them, and non-variant special resources.
6: There's no such thing as "mundane" resources - every material has some potential magical properties: iron naturally damages fey and inhibits magic, ice contains spirits of cold that can be unleashed to freeze an area, oak wood can absorb blood and grow to heal itself, and so forth.

What is the state of seafaring and maritime trade?

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