Here, have some ramblings! Please send questions or comments to ivan.unbound@gmail.com

Looking back on this supplement after two years, I realized that because I had so little room in a pocketmod-sized supplement, I just assumed that people would know what a medieval Cold War between Christianity and Islam with arcane and clerical magic available would look like. People who didn't grow up during the Cold War and who don't think about alternate history as much as me might have had a harder time of it.

Of course, one of the great things about the OSR is coming up with your own stuff. If you have a different idea what that looks like, ignore my ramblings.

To my mind, the first thing to understand is that from a modern perspective, both sides of the war are going to look a lot more like the USSR than the USA to anyone with modern sensibilities. We're talking two theocracies, Nyse and Irem, who are only as liberal as they absolutely have to be for political purposes, which means they don't persecute their own splinter sects as much as they might otherwise, and even then, they watch those sorts of people very, very carefully. Like the Communist Party in the USSR, in Nyse, the Christian Church is in control of the press, the military, the economy and many organizations, and it's not much different for the Caliphate in Irem.

One of the major things that prevents this war from being more "hot" is magic. While hardly nuclear weapons, clerical magic and carefully-sanctioned arcane magic can wreak a lot of havoc, especially considering that Athconnit is a whole lot tinier than Earth. In addition, there are mutual enemies in the form of the Fomorians and various other monsters. But both sides are preparing for an apocalyptic war, even if neither really wants to start it, religious beliefs nonwithstanding.

So, instead, you have spies and betrayal, with magic instead of high tech, and maybe a little high tech as well. You have influence wars and attempted conversions, and when things get hot at all, it's a sort of proxy war. More than once, there's been a battle between Christians and Muslims in Dogsard that has less to do with the actual faith of the combatants and more about the pursestrings of Nyse and Irem.

Now, I also understand that tapping into a real world conflict like the one between Christians and Muslims, the sort of thing that drove the Crusades, can be uncomfortable and problematic. And I'm not going to tell you why you should like it if you don't. If it bothets you or a player, substitute other religions, perhaps made-up ones, or ignore that element of the setting entirely.

On that note, it may also have not come through due to space limitations, but I made some effort to distant the Athconnit situation from the modern manifestations of that cultural conflict, and put it firmly in the realm of history and myth. 

On the Christian end, Prester John was a fictional Christian King that many folk believed existed for quite some time. The Referee Guide mentions Nestorian Christianity, meaning an early form of the Church of the East; the idea is that Nyse practices a form of Chistianity that no modern sect, even the Assyrian Church of the East, which most closely resembles the original Church of the East, would recognize. This allows the Referee to fictionalize the details even further, as the Church has changed over centuries in Athconnit.

Similarly, Irem of the Pillars is a legendary lost city mentioned in the Quran, and is meant to evoke a sense of unreality, both with its name and its hidden Caliph. The Referee guide vaguely mentions Caliph-Era Sunnis, with the idea of representing the earliest recognized members of that sect, and the time when the "One Thousand and One Nights" tales were first compiled. Again, this allows for the faith to have mutated in a very fictionalized direction, and also represents a version of the faith best suited to coping with the sort of creatures that appear in Athconnit.

This makes for a potentially rich, interesting, and weird source of adventure! However, whether the Referee goes in a fictionalized direction or not, they should be clear to the players what they are doing, and make sure everyone is comfortable and that there is no disresepct, even accidentally. This is supposed to be about fun, after all!

-Kirt Dankmyer

This product uses the OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a (see http://www.wizards.com/d20/files/OGLv1.0a.rtf )

Original map is by kos Nma, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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The names Black Box BookTM and Ivanhoe UnboundTM, including the Ivanhoe Unbound logo, when used in any context, are product identity, copyright 2017 by Kirt A. Dankmyer. All text that does not directly affect the game rules for the races and monsters contained in this document (or any other documents in this supplement) are product identity.

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