Riparian Knights

 Riparian Knights is a mini-setting for Stingers & Spores. It takes place in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico. My original plan was to make a tropical rainforest setting in Colombia, but I have a compulsion to make my games as scientifically accurate as possible (sans the magic and Arthrogods), and the lack of research material readily available in English stalled my plans for a rainforest setting. I may still revisit it when I’m done with Bugly.

I found several databases recording all sorts of details about Sonoran flora and fauna, and this persuaded me to give the desert more consideration. I’m glad I did, because the deserts of the American Southwest are very much alive, and worth a closer look.

The land of Riparia was as realistic as I could make it, and I used the opportunity to stat out many of the desert’s weirder insects. Ironclad beetles and tarantula hawks are two of my personal favorites.

I’m especially fond of the scale of the map of the kingdom of Riparia. A human could walk across it in a few minutes, but it is sufficiently vast to hold several provinces and major cities on an insect scale.