As some of you may have recognized, Valossa and its capital Porto Libre are adapted from Green Ronin's excellent Freeport: City of Adventure line. When locking down details of my setting, the idea of a setting-neutral city with plenty of locations, NPCs, and adventure hooks to drop down into an existing campaign world appealed to me, and it was something I decided was worth tracking down. I'm pretty happy with the results. There's easily enough in the Pirate's Guide to Freeport alone to fill multiple campaigns, and that's not even the most recent version of the book; it's just the one I have.
There's one problem, though.
See that? That is Freeport, Maine. My home town.
It's not like it's a particularly obscure place as far as Maine goes, even. We get tons of tourists every summer. It's where LL Bean was founded, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time just hanging out at their flagship store in my youth (they have a fish tank). The point is, the images evoked by the name "Freeport" in my mind are hilariously mundane, and not at all what the fine folks at Green Ronin were going for.
Also, there's not really an English-influenced culture in my setting anyway, so I don't use direct English names often.
So obviously, if I was going to use it, the name had to go. And my first thought was to translate it into another language. I started thinking about other places that produced a lot of pirates, and my mind went to the Spanish Main. Porto Libre it was, then. Less Caribbean, more Gulf. Less rain-soaked streets and powdered wigs, more tiled roofs and sunny balconies.
An aside: Yes, before anyone asks, I know it should be Puerto Libre. I didn't catch that mistake until it was too late, and it stuck.
Naturally, this led me to place the city and its island environs off the coast of Taldameer, the resident Spain stand-in in my world. I still wanted Porto Libre to feel distinct from the mainland without losing its Spanish character, though. For a while, I was leaning toward drawing inspiration from the Balearic Islands (and I still do a little of that); conveniently, they themselves have a long traditon of piracy. But then I got an idea just stupid enough to work.
Porto Libre, I decided, would be the Lunar Lands' equivalent of colonial-era Mexico.
This period in history is a fascinating one, and one that gets little attention in the Anglosphere. You can see the last vestiges of feudalism in the noble estates and their industries, making it fit surprisingly well into a medieval framework. And the collision of indigenous mythologies with Catholicism gave rise to a rich folkloric tradition that continues to this day, even beyond the stuff everyone knows about like the Day of the Dead. That gives me plenty of material to work with already.
As I gave Porto Libre a facelift, I soon realized that the material given the Freeport books wasn't going to contain everything I wanted to explore. Lifting a name from the background, I expanded the Serpents' Teeth into the larger island of Valossa. I could still have sweltering jungles, but there would also be room for all the desert bandits, lonely cattle ranchers, isolated mission houses, and dashing swashbucklers one could ask for. If I run a campaign in Valossa there will be at least one NPC played by Danny Trejo and you are going to like it dammit.
Yes, it's a bit anachronistic. I know it's outside the late-medieval-Europe scope of the majority of my setting, and even more separated by space than it is by time. Yes, I know that I try to be relatively non-Flinstonist in my approach to worldbuilding, and the presence of Mexico within a couple days of Greece is going to raise a few eyebrows. But who cares? This is a fantasy setting - one heavily inspired by history and folklore, yes, but even though there's an attention to authenticity, it's not meant to be shackled to it. I've already mashed together parts of different time periods, if the fact I have a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and an Abbasid Caliphate is any indication. A Mexico on top of that doesn't feel that weird.
It isn't like this is particularly new, either. Robert E. Howard, the man who pioneered fantasy worldbuilding because he liked writing historical fiction but took the "historical" part of that as a suggestion more than anything else, wasn't afraid to throw aspects of the colonial era and even later into the Hyborian Age - Pictland might be named for an ancient Scottish tribe, but it draws more influence from the frontier settlements found in Westerns. He himself might have based Zamora off of Mexico, as this article theorizes - and my discovery of that article was a big influence on deciding to go this route with Valossa.
In short - don't be afraid to think outside the box with your worldbuilding. Even if the majority of your setting is based on a particular region or era, there's no reason you can't incorporate pieces of another. In fact, it might help set your setting apart. A lot of people have expressed a desire to do something different from standard medieval European fantasy for their games, but many players find a complete departure from the norm jarring and difficult to adjust to. But if you decide to go halfway, and dump 17th century New Spain off the coast of 15th century Europe, suddenly you have something that feels different, but with all the comfortable touchpoints within reach.
From here on out, the Year of the Gazetteer's Valossa entries will largely focus on the parts of the Republic beyond Porto Libre itself. For information on the capital, I would recommend you go to The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, and just mentally replace everyone's names with the closest Spanish equivalent and all entries of "Sea Lord" with "Doge" (I prefer my silly one-off titles historically accurate, thank you). But there's far more to Valossa than just Porto Libre, and I hope you're ready to exploring it with me!
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