"One day I undertook a tour through the country, and the diversity and beauties of nature I met with in this charming season, expelled every gloomy and vexatious thought. Just at the close of day the gentle gales retired, and left the place to the disposal of a profound calm. Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below."
~Col. Daniel Boone, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784)
"The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, onto the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgement."
—THE AMERICAN JOE MILLER’S JEST BOOK
Welcome to the Crossroads: The New World Wikia
Crossroads: The New World is a community-built campaign setting for the Pathfinder d20 system, set in an alternate version of the year 1750 A.D., in the midst of a very different version of the colonization of the Americas. After years of development, the setting has grown too expansive to navigate easily as a thread, so we're reorganizing everything into something more easily digested.
Imagine a world where magic is real, where human beliefs shape the face of the spirit world, where spirits and monsters roam the earth. Imagine a world in the midst of a revolutionary shift, where peoples and nations all across the globe stand on the razor's edge between unprecedented growth and unfathomable disaster. Imagine a world which is at once intimately familiar and shocking in its strangeness, a world you may have lived in your entire life, yet never truly grasped how beautiful, how bizarre, how fascinating it really is. Imagine a world where Aztec jaguar-knights test skill and steel against Chinese martial artists. Where European priests match divine power against the arcane might of the Iroquois medicine men. Where the merchant-lords of Cahokia buy and sell furs, steel, gunpowder, slaves, mammoth ivory, spider silk, ironwood, and a thousand other exotic goods every day, with fortunes, reputations, and even lives on the line with every deal. Where mammoth-riders from the north join forces with the horse-tribes of the plains to battle the undead vessels of a dead god.
Imagine... a New World.
The Setting
The year is 1750 A.D. The discovery of the New World by both China and Europe began a mad rush to claim as much of the unspoiled landscape as possible. In the years since, much has changed, both for those already inhabiting the landscape and those colonizing it.
In the east, European colonies expand steadily inland across the land they know as Columbia, growing more and more dense as the ships bringing new colonists multiply almost as fast as the colonists themselves. England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Papal State all seek to establish a foothold in the new world, eager to edge their competitors out in the scramble for territory, often leaving the natives paying the price. But wherever cultures meet, there is an exchange, old and new world exchanging ideas, from technology to farming techniques to magical knowledge, and, perhaps most dangerously, philosophies. While tensions grow between the more powerful native groups and the colonists, so too do tensions grow between the colonists and their parent nations.
In the south, the Mexica have only grown more powerful since Cortez's failed invasion and sacrifice, despite the internal strife that followed. With a new understanding of metalworking, steel weapons and armor, and, perhaps most importantly, firearms, the empire expanded dramatically to dominate the majority of the sweltering jungles of the Aztatlan region. Few regions remain stubbornly out of their grasp, some held by still-squabbling city-states outside their borders, some held by Spanish hands, and some the realm of the unassailable Mayan fortresses, which have stood strong despite decades of attacks by both the Mexica and the Spanish.
In the heartland, the realm between the Heaven-Touching Mountains in the west and the Green Mountains in the east, there are many major players. In the northeast, the Ganonsyoni, known to the Europeans as the Iroquois League, control the Great Lakes and the shores of the river, all the way out to the sea, their skillful negotiators forging a confederacy, and even a limited sense of unity, all throughout their lands. In the southwest, Cahokia sits high on the Mississippi, the capital of a merchant empire that extends all down the great river and controls the most expansive trade network on the continent. Mound Lords dwell in great lodges atop the mounds that dominate the cities of the empire, immensely wealthy in both material goods and mystical power. The Great Plains are shared between countless horse-tribes, each independent, but all their warriors are united by a common code of honor and a common enemy. The bodies of the dead do not remain dead upon the plains, their bodies rising as undead vessels for a dead god, the walking dead barely kept in check by the riding warriors.
On the west coast, the nation of Fusang (扶桑) dominates, first colonized by Ming explorers, then flooded with a tide of refugees when the Qing rose to power and slew those loyal to the Ming, among the refugees the infant daughter of the last Ming emperor. With the help of the diseases they unknowingly brought with them and the Yehren, the sasquatches of the northwest rain-forest, the new empire survived and grew to a powerful presence, extending from the northernmost sections of the rainforest to the lands of Aztatlan in the south, and ruled by Her Radiant Majesty with an iron hand in a silken glove. Inland, the realm between the Snowy Mountains and the Heaven-Touching Mountains is shared. In the south, the Hisatsinom (sometimes incorrectly called the Anasazi) dwell in isolated cliff-cities threaded by bridges of spider silk, all but impenetrable both to attacks and to outsiders, fed by farms in the verdant delta and connected by extensive roads. Between the cities ride bandits and refugees once living in the north. To the north, the Little Folk laid claim to a swath of lands once held by nearly-exterminated humans, creating a sanctuary for the tiny fey from around the world to come and live free from fear of humans, out in the open for the first time in millennia.
The north is a complicated land. In the far west, explorers from Russia have turned the lands known as "Alasqa" into a chaotic frontier of outlawed magical practices, exiles, criminals, and the occasional earnest hopeful looking to strike it rich with a fortune in furs, or even be the one to find the rumored gold. To the east, the Dené people form dozens of independent tribes, struggling to deal with the newcomers even as they keep an eye on the squabbled to the east. Three massive powers rule the east, each seeking to gain advantage over the others, but never quite confident enough to wage open warfare. The mammoth-riders in the west bring a powerful mounted force to bear, unified by their common religion as they expand slowly and surely south. Around the bay, the giant-blooded Tuniit (known in our timeline as the extinct Dorset Culture) rule, an empire of massive warriors who do not fear the cold. The Tuniit see their human neighbors and relatives as lesser creatures, made to serve and be protected by the Tuniit, until their giant blood can be spread to their offspring as well. Upon the eastern shore and the great isle of Grœnland reside the Vinlandrs, a fusion of the bloodlines and cultures of the Norse settlers that once resided there and the Inuit they shared the land with. The Vinlandrs are a violent culture, producing extremely skillful warriors that until very recently were the only source of iron tools and weapons in the New World. Now, with the Europeans arriving, the balances of power shift and the long stalemate may break, but none can tell who will come out on top.
New and Altered Mechanics
Lore Information
- [List of Cultures]
- [List of Nations]
- [The Spirit World]
- [Spiritbeasts]
- [List of NPCs]
- Research and Inspirational Materials
Latest activity