When the Cataclysm shattered the continent of Taladas, the great master builders of Aurim were cast into a terrifying battle for survival. Dive deep into the highly regimented, colorful, and fascinating society of Baltch. Buy Time of the Dragon: https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/16960/time-of-the-dragon-2e?affiliate_id=50797
Transcript
Cold Open
While the rest of Krynn battles savage dragons, rogue sorcerers, and volcanic firestorms, one ordinary-looking civilization on the edge of Taladas is locked in a never-ending, relentless war against a completely unfeeling and unconquerable foe: the rising ocean itself.
Intro
Welcome to another DragonLance Saga episode. My name is Adam, and today, we are analyzing how the Baltch society survived the Cataclysm by transforming their entire civilization into a hyper-organized, clockwork engineering machine. I’d like to take a moment and thank the DLSaga members and Patreon patrons, and invite you to consider becoming a member or patron — you can even pick up Dragonlance media or get $10 by signing up to StartPlaying.Games using my affiliate links. I’m referencing the Time of the Dragon boxed set for this information. If I leave anything out or misspeak, please leave a comment below.
Discussion
Before the fiery mountain struck, the ancestors of this nation were not isolated islanders. They were the premier architects of Taladas, the legendary master builders who designed the sweeping monuments, roads, and aqueducts of the ancient Aurim Empire. Their hands guided the creation of the old capital, Amoushek the Golden, erecting its legendary towers and palaces. But when the Cataclysm hit, the continental plate supporting their beautiful upland plains suffered a massive subsidence. The earth literally sank. What had once been a high, proud region dropped into a swampy lowland, barely sitting above sea level. To make matters worse, the fracturing of the land completely severed Baltch from the mainland. Overnight, these urban master architects were trapped on a low-lying island, defenseless against the open expanse of the sea and the ferocious, destructive hurricanes that regularly sweep out of the southeast.
Physically, the Baltchians are an ordinary-looking lot. They are of average height and tend to be a little on the plump side. Their faces tell the story of their home—deeply tanned and weatherbeaten by the constant assaults of hot tropical sun and salty air. The men grow full, thick beards and long mustaches, while the women wear their straight hair long and loose. What they lack in striking physical features, they make up for in vibrant clothing. Using cotton grown directly on the island, they dye their garments in bright, vivid patterns of yellows, reds, oranges, and blues. In the fields, peasant men wear short pantaloons, easily rolled up above the knee, paired with a loose, short-sleeved jacket. The women wear identical pants matched with a tight-fitting, high-collared blouse. Out of the fields, both prefer flowing, floor-length cotton robes, accessorized with a simple headscarf or a brightly decorated straw hat.
The upper class takes this to an extreme, wearing multiple layers of loose cotton robes printed in deliberately clashing patterns to display wealth. If an individual is a government official, a specific silk sash draped over the shoulders identifies their precise rank and office within the state bureaucracy.
Faced with total annihilation by the ocean, the Baltchians looked at the rising tides as an engineering problem. Their solution was the construction of the Seawall—a massive, perimeter-enclosing network of dikes, canals, breakwaters, and earthwork levees. This system slowly grew to enclose almost the entire island. The only tiny gap left in the wall serves a dual purpose: it acts as a massive drainage floodgate during storms and forms their largest, most protected deep-water port, opening into the strait between Baltch and the Reed Delta. The Seawall cannot stop a hurricane, but it systematically blunts its force. When towering storm surges slam into the island, the waves tear across the outer breakwaters, losing their deadly momentum. The overflowing water is then safely funneled into a massive web of inland canals that drain the floodwaters away from the living spaces, while a series of secondary inner dikes protect the vital farmlands that sit completely below sea level.
A defensive marvel like the Seawall requires flawless maintenance. A single lapse in vigilance—one weakened dike ignored by a lazy crew—means hundreds of families could drown in a single night. Because of these terrifying stakes, the people of Baltch made a massive societal trade-off: they surrendered personal freedom for collective survival, submitting to the absolute rule of the Master Engineer. Under his guidance, life in Baltch is more heavily controlled and regimented than anywhere else on Krynn. Every citizen is a registered number in the Great Registry. Specialized wizards use divination magic to locate and record the birth, occupation, household size, and death of every single inhabitant. A citizen cannot move to a different town or change jobs without an official government permit. Land ownership is strictly recorded, and any newly drained swamp must be surveyed and approved by the capital. Furthermore, every citizen is legally assigned to a civil work gang and required to spend a set number of days every single year digging out muck from the canals or hauling stone to the dikes.
The structure of the government completely reflects this obsession. The most powerful political offices include the Grand Surveyor, the Ministry of Excavations, the Ministry of Prediction for tracking weather, the Commander of the Quarrymen, and the Commander of the Outer Dikes.
The true ruling class of the island is the Engineers. Trained from youth at a highly rigorous national university, their curriculum goes beyond basic math, geometry, and architecture; it includes military strategy, land assessment, law, and rhetoric. An Engineer isn’t just a builder; they act as judges, tax collectors, military commanders, heralds, and foreign ambassadors. Assisting these Engineer lords is a unique class of wizards known as the Recorders. These arcane spellcasters attend their own specialized universities where they are taught to track the phases of the moon gods on their magic. In the capital, high-ranking Recorders like the Grand Registrar or the Finder of the Hidden—who functions as a master tax collector—specialize in Greater Divination spells to process the massive mountain of bureaucratic paperwork. Meanwhile, out on the actual muddy dikes, the field wizards specialize in Alteration magic, using their spells to literally shape, soften, and manipulate massive blocks of stone for the construction crews.
Because Baltch is an isolated island, they have absolutely no standing army. If a threat ever arises, the Engineers simply activate their daily canal work gangs and instantly arm them as a massive civilian militia. While these peasants are poorly trained in formal combat, their years of experience rapidly mobilizing and working under extreme pressure during frantic storm repairs translates perfectly to military maneuvering. The Engineers might have amateur soldiers, but they can raise staggering numbers of troops and mass them in one precise spot in record time, which has been more than enough to deter any localized invasions.
However, as an island nation, they do maintain a highly advanced navy. Lacking the massive lumber resources of the Minotaur League, the Engineers applied their architectural brilliance to naval design, building some of the strongest, fastest ships on the ocean. To get the wood required, Baltchian logging crews regularly sail across the straits into the dangerous wild jungles of Neron and deep upriver into the Reed Delta. They establish temporary logging camps on the mainland shores, building the ships right there on the spot. Over the centuries, these temporary camps have been revisited so frequently that they have evolved into semi-permanent, fortified outposts—the very first steps of a fledgling Baltchian colonial empire creeping into the untamed wild.
With their superior ships and highly capable crews, the sailors of Baltch have become the vital merchant connective tissue of Taladas. Their trade routes are vast and dangerous. They regularly navigate the close waters of the Fisheries and trade with the various tribes of the Rainward Isles. Some brave captains even venture down to the dark, southern coasts of Thenol—though it’s an unpopular voyage because the Thenolites are widely known to be a dour, sinister, and deeply unsettling people. A few incredibly adventurous captains even dare to risk the lethal, unpredictable currents of the Storm Sea to reach the ruined shores of Old Aurim, trading with temperamental hobgoblins simply out of a pure sense of curiosity and adventure.
When these massive Baltchian trading fleets return home or travel from port to port, their deep cargo holds are absolutely bursting with a fascinating array of international goods: massive bales of locally grown cotton and heavy bags of Baltchian rice, rare mahogany woods and exotic spices plundered from the jungles of Neron, raw copper and iron mined from the Rainward Isles, fine silks purchased from Thenol, and strange, magical antiquities excavated from the imperial ruins of Old Aurim. Because the continent of Taladas is fundamentally torn in half by the roaring, radioactive firestorms of Hitehkel, the brave merchant sailors of Baltch serve as the literal, missing link that connects the peoples of the east and the west.
Outro
But that is all the time I have to talk about the people of the Baltch. How would your players react to stepping off a boat into a beautiful, hyper-vibrant tropical city, only to realize they can’t leave without a notarized, magical permit from the Grand Surveyor? Leave a comment below.
I would like to invite you to subscribe to this YouTube channel, ring the bell to get notified about upcoming videos, and click the like button. It all helps other Dragonlance fans learn about this channel and its content. Thank you for watching — this has been Adam with DragonLance Saga, and until next time, remember:
Hey, constable, you know what you can do with that whistle? You could…
