Talk:Koryo

Inspired by Korea (source) David Latapie (✒ | @)

Finished!
At last! I've more-or-less finished my Koryo project. :D I only need to make some more maps for the smaller sub-kingdoms and put these on all the location pages, and made some tiny articles for Tu Pe, but I can do these on an occasional basis from now on.

Being a bit interested in Korea, I had fun with this, though the subject matter is frustrating. It's too vague and undefined on many points, like its history, culture, society, and faith. Forgetting to name the big bad king of Silla and creating a completely one-sided war with Kozakura were major oversights. Making up completely new monsters without stats rather than using those from regular D&D or Oriental Adventures or even Korean mythology is also not helpful. What the hell is a Krestung anyway? Pinching names of locations from the real-world Korea (including no less than three different names for Jeju Island) seems lazy. Yet it still misses a bit of mythology and legend from the actual Korea. The region seems to struggle to have a distinct character as a result.

Still, I like to see it as the traditional lawful good kingdom of the area, like an eastern Impiltur or Cormyr, though it may be closer to Tethyr as a kingdom on the rebuild. Rambling on homebrew for a bit, for my Koryoan PC, I liked to rename things to sound more Korean or less so. Change Silla to "Xilla" to sound more fantastic, and then the cities of Xi, Xai Chung, and Xi Hulang sound like its settlements, suggesting more history. I named the king of Silla "King U" (after a real Korean king, just for the weird name) and see him as like a North Korean tyrant, who destroyed libraries and books (as on Saishu) and all the historical works in the land, so the kingdom's history starts with him, which explains the scattershot history. And my character is his hidden daughter, raised to be a true knight but torn in her loyalties like from some Korean wuxia movies. Until her adventures in Wa flagged, then her appearance in the Moonsea came to an abrupt halt.

So, the realm is made up of half-baked plothooks and is definitely a fixer-upper, with a lot of blanks to be filled. But since I can have some fun fixing it up and filling in those blanks, maybe it's working exactly as intended. — BadCatMan (talk) 09:39, April 25, 2017 (UTC)