The interrelations of Colville's beasts

Let's talk about the world(s) of Matthew Colville's campaign, underlying Liber Bestarius: the Book of Beasts (Eden, 2001-2).

I've reviewed Liber Bestarius somewhere online but never on my own territory. I regret I don't remember where else. Maybe the Eden Odyssey forum. So I shan't review the book here - except to report that I liked it overall.

Colville explains the setting pp. 148-9 - rather, he lists four "settings" in it. Three of them are in what we'd call "the Prime Material": Beast Lords of Kham, Empire of Jade, Great Swamp. A fourth, Realm of Faerie, is what Monte Cook would call "in conjunction" with the Prime. It turns out that some of these settings interlink with each other, and with other settings in the text: Faerie, for instance, links with the Swamp (p. 107). The skitterwings are fey representations of the Swamp's mosquitoes.

Colville's inter-"relations" matter to the rest of us where they interrelate temporal settings. Those may happen also through planar conjunction... but in most cases, they don't. Since these relations are temporal, and since distances of tens of thousands of miles are being bandied about, these settings serve to constrain a single game world.

Here, relations bind the Swamp with Kham. The Kham's Thet, the Flumph of this campaign and artifically so, connect with Quisloi, Skresh, and Tegano p. 132. The Thal, also artificial, connect less explicitly with Quisloi p. 128. Colville makes more optional the Tisyah's interrelations p. 135. These are both to the Skresh and to the Qor that is, both to the Swamp and to Kham.

The Skresh city Phon-Thir is in a "jungle" part of the Swamp, and its centre. The Tegano own the Swamp's seashore p. 122. "Centre" here means inland. It turns out p. 128 that Kham, hundreds of miles wide as it is, is not sovereign over all its jungle - let alone its marshes.

That the Swamp and Kham are so intimately bound means that Kham is coming from inside the hou... er, Swamp. More, Kham's centre is so far from the swamp's centre Phon-Thir, that Kham cannot even be the half of it. Kham, like Phon-Thir not marshy, is also inland for that same reason. The term "Great Swamp" is applied by outsiders and by Kham, to "that part of the humid tropics what Kham don't got".

Besides the great rainforest-wetland and the Tisyah-dominated savannah, Colville brings further locations. Far "north" is a "tundra", where live the Orsk, Ruhk, and Thark pp. 85-6, 100-2, 129-30. Kham conducts a brisk traffic in Orsk visual organs p. 128. Kham owns the snail island to the south p. 141, so coastline not under Tegano command; that's how the ships get out. Another location is the Desert of The Nange: once jungle, p. 78. The implicit relation here is p. 90 to the Qor, south of Kham. But this assumes Qor are unfamiliar with the Nange, so there is no necessary direct relation.