The Creek-Stream River route from Colymar to Nochet

[Squaredeal Sten]

Seems to me from the consensus about strong currents from the New River south,  that a cargo portage at New Crystal City makes trade on the Creek Stream river system practical.  The boats don't have to be ported.  You trans ship to different boats.      But the downstream trade will be suitable for heavy and bulky cargoes while up Stream is not. 

This makes Dragon Pass a source of bulky raw materials for Esrolia, while trade up Stream will be much less bulky finished goods and exotic imports from distant places.  

So Sartar will export raw wool and lumber to Esrolia by water.  If the lumber rafts are banged up in the cataracts that's not a big loss.  

Meanwhile the up Stream cargo is Esrolian fashion clothing, Pamaltelan spices, Kralorelan silk.  None of which cause the boats to sink deep.

And it is very seasonal going upstream.  Esrolian traders will leave for Sartar in Fire season and either stay or go back south in Earth season.  Anyone using this route from Dark through Sea seasons will do more walking and riding than boating.

I am interested by Joerg's discussion of Reed boats.  Are these usually pulled out of the water and dried periodically?

From the little I recall about Heyerdahl's Ra, it seemed to me that his reed boat builders were used to making much smaller fishing boats, and Ra was the biggest reed craft they ever made.  Heyerdahl knew it could be done because of the ancient Egyptian pictures.

 

Edited August 27, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
Seasonality. And the spelling scrambler.

[scott-martin]

On 8/25/2022 at 5:04 PM, Squaredeal Sten said:

Valadon:  "the lowest fordable place" so it will be the northern limit of navigation for large watercraft.  But not necessarily a barrier for ducks boats or rafts or any purpose built shallow draft boat.  No ships north (up river)  of there, but that doesn't mean no cargo on the river.

Monros;  A road junction and ferry, as well as a 'rich' temple.  The river here is clearly navigable.

One interesting detail here is that the river is an obstacle to freight in both these places: you need a way across it so the route can continue. We can see the road network. Whatever they are carrying between those esrolian nomes is probably not coming down river . . . and the terminal leg up to Axe Hall makes me wonder if it's as much of a pilgrimage system as anything explicitly mercantile. In that scenario, maybe they want to stay on dirt as much as they can, following the imarjan ley lines or dinosaur tracks or whatever.

("Walk the spine of the earth," dragon woman's ghost told me. And I said, "hey, funny how we never talk about you, dragon woman.")

Looking a little deeper, the historical window is critical for any riverboat traders and/or smugglers. And possibly politically fraught. A lot of the deep cult lore got wrapped up in EWF ("dragon river?") and suddenly vanished from the world. Delecti really hurts the river in the centuries that follow, possibly with Korang magic, and then the human cult is completely exterminated north of the Kill. It gets hard for Sky River Titan to reach the homeward ocean and the character of the watershed splits, maybe multiple times but the one that concerns us today is between the upper Engizi (run by plucky duck people and trolls with skyfall nets, big bugs and other exotic resources) and the newly relevant Marzeel keeping Karse going. This is the ancestral route the ducks and trolls know, by the way. They aren't especially dynamic or ambitious.

And then no more than a century later, the Lead Hills sever Engizi entirely from its outlet, which is a very bad thing. Belintar achieves a solution. Interestingly, now all that delicious silt eventually flows into the Esrolian orchards and fields. In the process he builds or recollects a new human cult for the river, probably drawing on what they had with Lyksos but amplified and, like the artificial New River passage, engineered to reduce explicit stygian influence among other things. Like many formerly independent religious factions around the Holy Country, the river cult is grateful but maybe a little resentful as well: it owes Belintar a debt and while it's better to owe than to be dead, you'd rather be alive and free.

There's no record of Marzeel receiving any consolation. This is a pretty good demonstration of how much he really cares about rivers in themselves.

However, we know that the modern river is run by the troll priests at Crabtown, who retain the ancient mysteries and their own stygian agenda. I suggest that their boats are black and bear the mark of Argan, which might not have been welcome when Belintar was around but now who's going to stop them? It's the hero wars.

[Squaredeal Sten]

43 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

......
However, we know that the modern river is run by the troll priests at Crabtown, who retain the ancient mysteries and their own stygian agenda. I suggest that their boats are black and bear the mark of Argan, which might not have been welcome when Belintar was around but now who's going to stop them? It's the hero wars.

Now that's in interesting point.  Why is it that the only place we have heard of Uz with boats is Crabtown?   

Did the upland marsh cut off Uz river trade with the Shadow Plateau?  Or did they just never use boats much?

 

[M Helsdon]

2 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Now that's in interesting point.  Why is it that the only place we have heard of Uz with boats is Crabtown?   

The Black Galleys of the trolls of Jrustela are famous.

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

("Walk the spine of the earth," dragon woman's ghost told me. And I said, "hey, funny how we never talk about you, dragon woman.")

Funny how Blue Dragon Woman Sshorga had her spine broken by the Dragonspine, from Orlanth beheading Sh'Har'karzeel (place interpunctation as you see fit).

The Lead Hills are the Spine of the Nightdragon attacking Belintar across the Dragon River, again severing much of the river's spine, although the underground river through Styx Grotto provides a lot more continuity than the severing of Sshorga (creating the Oslir) provided.

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Looking a little deeper, the historical window is critical for any riverboat traders and/or smugglers. And possibly politically fraught. A lot of the deep cult lore got wrapped up in EWF ("dragon river?") and suddenly vanished from the world.

The draconification of natural features and local deities was rather rampant under the Third Council. Orgorvalte Summer was one of those victims.

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Delecti really hurts the river in the centuries that follow, possibly with Korang magic,

Delecti escapes the 1042 mass utuma, indicating that he either already had started his corpse-hopping career, or (IMG more likely) that he was a Jrusteli-taught sorcerer rather than a draconic mystic who just used the Proximate Holy Realm of the Third Council's version of the Dragon Dream for his own magical experiments and research.

The collapse of the Proximate Holy Realm by the 1042 assassination of all dragonspeakers above a certain degree caused the draconic crops and herds to fail badly, depopulating Dragon Pass to an extent similar to the Irish Potato famine. The Carmanian/Dara Happan/Sairdite raid of 1042 into the leaderless pass exacerbated the famine, and probably the death toll, with the exodus into the south swelling the cities of Esrolia and the lands and cities of the Hendriki. Those who remained in the Pass would be faced by further raids both from the north and from Prax before 78 years later the Invincible Golden Horde triggered the Dragonkill and the Inhuman Occupation.

Urban centers like Orin Jisteel (nowadays better known as Delecti's Ruin) may have been hit harder than rural areas, with all the stuff in the granary decomposing into a noxious slime, so Delecti may have take over a ghost town with a rich amount of fresh corpses for his demesne away from Remakerela. His previous research in chimeras had run out of magical juice, but he found the Zorak Zoran magic that powers his zombification instead, possibly already avaliable after the Mass Utuma. He might even have defended the place against the Carmanians etc. with the dead bodies of the former Third Council leaders.

His transformation of the Lakes seems to be linked to what he did to that dryad. But I don't see any possible link to Korang the Slayer, who was a nigh unstoppable warrior with a more than deadly spear rather than another Nontraya leading the walking dead from the Underworld against the Living. The self-sacrifice of Hard Earth coincides with the beginning of the Creek-Stream River, with his corpse not hindering Engizi's run to aid Magasta with the Void in the center of the world.

Engizi does seem to claim the previous course of the Blue Dragon River through Ernaldela for his run towards the Homeward Sea which was just forming. It was his river who revived Choralinthor, not the contact with Rozgali or the revived Solkathi who emerged from the Doom Current taking Sshorg's path from the east before curving into the Maelstrom.

As Engizi met the dormant tributaries of Sshorg's River, these awakened, most of them sending down Heler's waters down to join Engizi's run into the Maelstrom, except for the Syphon which felt the greater pull from the Footprint, carrying deeper briny water up into the void left by Krarsht and the poisoned ichor of Larnste's foot wound. It was Engizi connecting them back to the primal Deep that revived those rivers, initially not necessarily through his destination in the Maelstrom but through the new torrent raining down from Lorion's celestial river that was (and is) fed from the heart of the seas (and continues to run up the sky dome in order to reach the Maelstrom).

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

and then the human cult is completely exterminated north of the Kill.

I wonder what human riverfolk there would have been in Kethaela and Kerofinela prior to Korang's rampage. With Faralinhor's sea reduced to a salt lake by Vadrus, Flesiska's newtlings and the Pelaskites were reduced to watching over saline puddles and mud in the Choralinthor basin, fed by Heler's rains but evaporated by Orlanth's unruly kin.

At the Dawn, the southernmost riverfolk in Dragon Pass and Saird are the Nogatendings, whose Black Eel River is part of the Oslir river system connected to the White Sea, re-awakened somewhat from Valind's enforced cold sleep and captivity under Manarlarvus's dome by the chaos horde advancing to the Unity Battle.

The human boat people of Choralinthor did spread into the rivers, as did the newtlings. If there were durulz in the region prior to the efforts of Remakerela, the same would go for them, but I haven't seen any FIrst or Second Age source mentioning them other than by Mongoose. (Keets on the other hand have an undoubted continuous presence in the East Isles.)

(While the Luatha spell transformed the human population into beastfolk similar to that of Remakerela in 1049, I haven't seen any mention or evidence of durulz in Kanthor's Isles. No idea why not.)

The newtlings of Choralinthor Bay (and probably of breeding ponds elsewhere) appear to have a long-standing agreement of indenture with the dragonewts in exchange for dragon magics to bring back to their breeding ponds. They may have continued to ply some riverine trade from Karse with the Pass region even after the Dragonkill. Pelaskites from Karse or beyond also had annual expeditions up the Stream, at least according to the HQ Dragon Pass: Land of Thunder, A Gazetteer to Kerofinela. (Which apparently confused Poverri for Pelaskos, then decided to stand with the mix-up for additional game fun, which resonates nicely with Enjossi's salmon quest nonetheless. Unless those annual quests are the Pelaskite ongoing contribution to have salmon re-entering Choralinthor Bay.)

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

It gets hard for Sky River Titan to reach the homeward ocean and the character of the watershed splits, maybe multiple times but the one that concerns us today is between the upper Engizi (run by plucky duck people and trolls with skyfall nets, big bugs and other exotic resources) and the newly relevant Marzeel keeping Karse going.

Belintar's aid sending the accumulating waters in the Dammed Marsh to aid Magasta's Pool again. @jajagappa's pbf Nochet campaign on RPGGeek has the Aqueducts of Panaxles and Sestarto taking up some of the core waters of the river, leading these through the connecte baths and then the sewers into the Bay away from the Lyksos estuary, following the much older bed of the Lyksos in the sewer tunnels.

Renaming the former River estuary the Marzeel estuary is overstating the contribution of this rather minor tributary to the waters flowing through Suchara Vale, but might have been part of Belintar's price for sending the Skyfall waters on towards Magasta's Pool.

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

This is the ancestral route the ducks and trolls know, by the way. They aren't especially dynamic or ambitious.

The first documented mention of ducks is as survivors of the Dragonkill, remaining in Kerofinela. They get to expand their horticulture into the farmlands abandoned by the humans who fled the Golden Horde or got eaten or incinerated by the dragons, quite high up into the foothills of the Quivin Mountains.

As far as I can tell the Upland Marsh was significantly smaller during the Inhuman Occupation, and the course of the Creekstream River may have been little hindered compared to its prior slowing in the Lakes.

What interest would the durulz have had to present themselves as tasty snacks to the Shadow Plateau trolls just to reach Karse? If there was a population in need of traveling up and down the River, it would have been the Newtling Bachelors on their way to/from serving the dragonewts for their magic to protect their breeding ponds from the trolls.

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

And then no more than a century later, the Lead Hills sever Engizi entirely from its outlet, which is a very bad thing. Belintar achieves a solution. Interestingly, now all that delicious silt eventually flows into the Esrolian orchards and fields.

Only if you assume annual floodings of the Lyksos valley that were previously too high above the river. All that lovely land on the river bottom in that valley now has become a permanent bed for the much expanded river, the rather high Sea Season floodings prior to the completion of the New River have become the new low water normal.

In my opinion, the raising of the water levels caused lots of fertile North Esrolian river valley soil to be transported into Choralinthor Bay, initially to the detriment of the benthic organisms (like mussle banks or corals) and their cultivators/predators in the northwestern Choralinthor Bay, although giving rise to an increased fertiity in the longer run.

The Dammed Marsh continues to be a sedimentation trap even during the annual floodings of the river, not that the Upland Marsh allows much sediment from the Creek or the Upper River to go past Duck Valley. The magical vegetation spread by the Dancers in Darkness continues to silt up the basins of the former Lakes, and might incessantly raise the "water level" of the Marsh.

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

In the process he builds or recollects a new human cult for the river, probably drawing on what they had with Lyksos but amplified and, like the artificial New River passage, engineered to reduce explicit stygian influence among other things. Like many formerly independent religious factions around the Holy Country, the river cult is grateful but maybe a little resentful as well: it owes Belintar a debt and while it's better to owe than to be dead, you'd rather be alive and free.

Based on Harald's Nochet map, I would expect the Lyksos River to have been a fixture in Nochet since at least the Silver Age, when the aqueducts and cisterns of the western and southern district were connected to its waters. Belintar redirecting the River into this water-course may have been the initall impulse for his Fish Road project which connected the Great Exchange below Loon Island with the heart of the seas neyond Deeper and the Troll Strait. If this assumption bears out, Belintar could have reached Magasta's Pool long before the Opening. The Syphon River branch of the Fish Roads into the Underworld may have become a significant bypass for the bllocked stairwell of the Obsidian Palace basements, too. Makes me wonder what Krarsht made of this intrusion into the heart of her children's tunnels...

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

There's no record of Marzeel receiving any consolation. This is a pretty good demonstration of how much he really cares about rivers in themselves.

The Marzeel estuary and Suchara Vale received the inverse effect of the raising of the water levels in the Lyksos Valley. With the remaining current seeping out of the Backwind Marsh and carried down by the Marzeel amounting to maybe a forth or a third of the previous current, quite a bit of the old riverbed would have fallen dry, or at least drier.

While the river bottom would consist mainly of bigger or heavier detritus, without the stronger current a strip of wetland would be able to form on the shores, possibly retaining what sediments the Marzeel floodings contributed to the flow in Sea Season. At the very least, littoral life forms would get the chance to expand, leading to an increase of benthic life, water fowl, and probably other hunting targets.

IMG the Marzeel has seasonal lumber rafting to Karse and beyond, fueling the boat- and ship-building industry of eastern Kethaela, and possibly some of that in Nochet as well. The appearance of the Lead Hills would have changed the rafting, and probably make it slightly harder in the tidal portion of the estuary, where the tidal influence would now be more noticable in Suchara Vale than before when the current of the River surpassed all other effects on the waters.

 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

However, we know that the modern river is run by the troll priests at Crabtown, who retain the ancient mysteries and their own stygian agenda. I suggest that their boats are black and bear the mark of Argan, which might not have been welcome when Belintar was around but now who's going to stop them? It's the hero wars.

Crabtown and the surrounding marshes are separated from the river draining Snake Pipe Hollow by something resembling the Niagara Falls. Due to the marshy nature of the lands around Skyfall Lake, rather little sediment makes it down into the Hollow, keeping the ledge creating the falls rather stable against erosion by chafing debris. While I can see heroic boaters finding a way to surf the vertical drop, I doubt that there would be anything resembling even occasional water traffic through the Hollow. If the trolls want to reach the Mirrorsea by boat, the Creek might be the more practicable proposal. They still would have to cross the Upland Marsh and the Dammed Marsh...

At least IMG there are cave harbors below the Shadow Plateau, with huge slabs of obsidian able to glide or roll to the side when the time comes to let those black galleys sail again. No idea whether the trolls of Jrustela originated in the Obsidian Palace, but if they did, they might have brought the OOO's boating tradition with them.

Otherwise, Kogag's beetle carapace coracles might just as well travel down the Zola Fel at night. Maybe from the edge of the Redwood, maybe from the Rubble.

 

[soltakss]

12 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

There's a third elephant in the room.

It seems to be a very crowded room.

[scott-martin]

17 hours ago, Joerg said:

At least IMG there are cave harbors below the Shadow Plateau, with huge slabs of obsidian able to glide or roll to the side when the time comes to let those black galleys sail again. No idea whether the trolls of Jrustela originated in the Obsidian Palace, but if they did, they might have brought the OOO's boating tradition with them.

MG too. You guys have helped me build out a sense of what the "dragon" form of the cult might have looked like at its height that reincorporates some of the odd observations about this particular river without having to go back to the unpleasant question of whether part of the cult is animistic or theistic or even sorcerous. The important part for our purposes here is that at the Grotto the river that leapt as Lorion and plunged as the Sky River Titan found its symbolic way back to the oldest original water. Once it entered the caves (I'm thinking of a literal dark water ride complete with bardo style instructive decoration) the journey that started as rain on the mountain lake ended. Whatever outlets it had were secret and trollish.

The water that reemerged as the Marzeel had a different quality and had the more usual land invasion origin and drainage, without quite the same mythic charge (white water torrent, whatever) as the core Engizi. Greg's hydraulic maps being what they are might remember crawling up past the future River bed to become the Creek. This course did not contain (much) Sky River and so encouraged something like normal human traffic down to Karse within historical times.

This opens up a chance to explore why the Stream is special, possibly through later engineering along the lines of what became the Janube (or, later, the New River). Dragon Pass retains many secrets that all our adventuring has yet to reveal. But for now we don't need to know. Water being water, there is great confusion of entities and identities throughout.

The Grotto and the Great Serpent also preserved deep mysteries of Hard Earth that were extremely important to advanced Engizi cultists. As we all know, Hard Earth becomes the Black Dragon Mountains that provide the Skyfall such an erosion-resistant basin. Down here, everything aspires to the quality of softer and chewier na-metal but even so, blocking the return path at exactly this point is the ultimate injury, cutting Engizi off from all outlets sacred or profane. I don't know what would have happened if the canal hadn't relieved the situation . . . my system hydraulics are in Greg's league . . . but we know it would have been bad. (This is funny for me as we contemplate engineering our backyard water to something that sometimes flows faster and in other phases delays flowing altogether.)

Speaking of bad things, Delecti explicitly uses a poisoned weapon to bleed the River at the point that becomes the Marsh. Two poisoned weapons in one myth is overkill. Like magnets, they will converge one way or another, intentionally or otherwise. If this wasn't originally Korang magic, it can be read as Korang magic now . . . and I suspect that, perhaps unknowing, this is what the ducks, talking crawdads, leaping salmon and other post-Kill cultists are drawing on as they try to heal that stretch of river. (Two broken beds in one myth is also overkill. The Grotto was probably sacred to Hard Earth as well and this is why OOO's desperate move is such a betrayal. Seepage from the Print nearby suggests an even larger mythic system at work here.)

Like you, I am not convinced there is much historical evidence for ducks (unlike keets of course) before the Remaking. Engizi could have simply reached out to preserve some of his remaining people by transforming them into semi-aquatic forms the Kill would not recognize, much like Jimi Hendrix in the oracular song "1983".

Note that crushing the Grotto eradicates the esoteric lower passage and forces Engizi to become more like normal rivers, with a more normal outlet and Homeward phase after the marriage to Esrola is achieved. This is simply another demonstration of how the world is aging. The black galleys might be high and dry until the long-anticipated Flood liberates them for one last sail. Hey, it's the hero wars.

I do not know if Orlanth Is Dead interfered with the Sky Fall. My suspicion is that this is a separate "weather" system that obeys its own rules but for all I know the Creek and the River had more trouble maintaining normal flow. Ice pack, at least, was probably insane, so they can run on melt for awhile. This is probably a deep quest for Water Rune people to explore, involving nymphic identification and so forth.

And then there are the littorals in the notoriously "tide-wracked" Holy Country where a hex can be land or water depending on the day. The conspiracy minded can imagine Belintar trying to manipulate the Choralinthor and adjust fertility patterns in the process . . . I always liked the idea of him overseeing something like nilotic flood one way or another to keep all those endless Esrolian nomes happy. Maybe when he came onboard the Earth Sixth was facing something like a soil crisis and the shallow Sea Sixth had its own problems with sedimentation that needed to be rectified. Bringing Engizi into a different configuration conveniently achieved his miracles and kept people happy for awhile. I wouldn't be surprised to see the new flow raising new islands in some places and maybe pushing others below the tide more or less permanently.

In general what becomes the Sea Sixth seems to have been suppressed under OOO, pushed into a more "stygian" channel or ignored entirely. I don't know if he had a relationship with the triolini. Pelaskites, like most true humans, were probably a little afraid of his people and their tithes.

[Joerg]

13 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Two poisoned weapons in one myth is overkill

Or they set up the way for a third one, to get things right.

13 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I do not know if Orlanth Is Dead interfered with the Sky Fall. My suspicion is that this is a separate "weather" system that obeys its own rules but for all I know the Creek and the River had more trouble maintaining normal flow. Ice pack, at least, was probably insane, so they can run on melt for awhile.

IMG this has little do do with whether the air it falls through is dead or not. The real question is whether that last bit of non-moving air has a greater cooling effect than the vast amount of Middle Air it falls through before. How much Fire/Heat does the Celestial River possess, anyway? While we have Tanian as the god of burning water, Lorion's invasion into the Sky Dome caused the flame color to change - although to blue, which (at least in the real world) is an indication of hotter temperature.

The original rush of the Creekstream River happened during the Great Darkness, at a period when Chaos had broken Valind's power apart, and cold wasn't a consideration for the general situation of misery. That has been my WTF about the Whitewall-induced winter since I first heard about it...

 

Annual floodings distributing fertile soil from uphill: The Nile draws its silt from the Sahara, an area of dry erosion and little fertility (if only for lack of water). Dragon Pass on the other hand has Loess soil, the blessing already delivered, by Orlanth, but usually held in place by vegetation, unless you mis-manage it like in Oklahoma with its black storms.

Was there any such black storm incident when the agriculturalists returned to the Pass? May that have been one reason why agriculture did not take off as much in the Grazelands as in the rest of the former Grazer territory covering all of Tarsh and Sartar and neutral places?

While I see spring floods along all of the rivers, I still don't see much of a positive effect on the lands, but the Seas as profiting, the rivers returning to their original purpose, bringing back the lost surface fertility into the seas. The Oslir and Zola Fel may be different, but neither the Lyksos nor the Esrolian Mesopotamia upriver from Rhigos has such conditions. IMG Esrolia remains fertile despite this erosion, not because of it. Water is retained for irrigation, a process which usually captures the silt - see Assuan or the changes in the Yellow River due to hydroelectric dams.

 

The Rightarm Isles shifted their allegiance to the Waertagi friends of the Ludoch early on in History, increasing the benefits to be had from worshipping the deeper seas. The Pelaskites spreading out from Karse remianed under Kitori regulation, though. I like to point out the stubbornness of coastal fisherfolk to stick to their ways separate from the overland merchants and farmers in the hinterland in many a coastal situation, with Friesland a possible exception as land reclamation requires farmers with an affinity to the seas. Some of that may be my desire to have more in the way of Ertebølle or coastal Sami fisherfolk subsistence than total cultural assimilation. After all, the weeders in Peloria managed to retain their cultural identity over the same period.