It is no secret that I’ve been playing in an awesome Empire of the Petal Throne campaign through 2015 and into 2016 (next session is today!). So when I started working on a Christmas present for a close friend I looked at his neighbourhood and realized that while the structures looked a bit off for a traditional medieval village, they fit in very well for what I had come to imagine a Tsolyánu village would look like.

In Tsolyánu, family clans are an essential part of the social structure, and most clans maintain a clan house where members live and family business is taken care of. This makes for a setting with much larger buildings than the average western medieval fantasy (at least from my perspective).

Gladecrest Village is one such village situated along the side of a Sákbe road (which serve as a combination of the classic Roman roadways and something similar to the Great Wall – three-tiered roadways with guard towers along the length that span Tsolyánu and much of the lands around.) On the west side of the village is a small fortress along the river bank, while the southeastern stretch of the village is made up of five clanhouses and three storage silos for grains and other foodstuffs. Interspersed between are the typical homes that make up a village, although family and clan connections make it so they are clustered in groups of four to six in general.