Tulan Of The Isles Riverport Nexus Of Riches And Adventure Midkemia

Getting Started With Tulan

Tulan is a port city on the northern coast of the Tsurani islands, part of the broader Midkemia setting by Raymond E. Feist. It features heavily in the later books of the Riftwar cycle and the subsequent series. For tabletop purposes, Tulan serves as a starting point for maritime campaigns, espionage plots, and trade-focused adventures. The city has a distinctive layout that matters a lot if you want anything to feel authentic. Most GMs who run Tulan-based games struggle with one thing: getting the geography right. The city sits on an island chain with multiple harbors, a river system that cuts through the urban core, and distinct districts separated by water and elevation. If your players think they can walk from the merchant quarter to the noble district in five minutes, they have no idea how the city actually works.

Tulan Of The Isles Riverport Nexus Of Riches And Adventure Midkemia

The term "Riverport Nexus of Riches and Adventure" isn't an official Feist publication title. It appears in various fan discussions and RPG resources describing Tulan as a campaign hub. Several community-made PDFs and campaign modules use similar phrasing. If you are looking for downloadable material, search those terms on sites like DriveThruRPG, RPGNow, or the FanPro archives. Some community wikis also host map packs and encounter tables. I spent about three weeks last year building a Tulan campaign and ran into a specific problem early on. I had designed a smuggling quest that required players to navigate from the eastern warehouse district through the central river markets to the western noble quarter, all while being pursued by city guards. The issue was that I hadn't accounted for tide schedules. In Tulan's canonical geography, the river levels shift noticeably between high and low tide, and certain passages become impassable during low water. My players tried to take a shortcut through the shallows at low tide and got their boat stuck for two full in-game hours. That actually made the scene better than my original design, but I had to quickly improvise a guard patrol that found them stranded. Before running anything similar, I would strongly recommend mapping out your tide tables or explicitly stating that tidal shifts don't affect your game. Here is what most people miss when they try to build a Tulan session. The city operates on a layered social structure that isn't just rich versus poor. There are three distinct merchant classes: the foreign trading houses (mostly Tsurani and some Kelewan), the local island guilds that control local distribution, and the smuggler networks that move goods outside official channels. These groups are not simply hostile toward each other. They exist in a state of negotiated coexistence where business happens between them constantly. A well-run Tulan game treats all three as faction nodes rather than background flavor.

Another thing that trips up new GMs is the magic system interaction. Midkemia magic, particularly the priestly traditions, works differently near Tulan's spiritual sites. The city sits on multiple ley line intersections due to its island geography. Characters with spellcasting abilities will notice that mana density fluctuates based on which district they occupy. This isn't just lore flavor. If you want mechanical consistency, you can assign a simple modifier: +1 to magic checks in the Temple District and -1 in the lower river markets during certain seasons. You don't need to track this precisely, but your players will start making decisions based on magical terrain the same way they would based on physical terrain. If you are putting together downloadable content, I recommend starting with a district map rather than a full city overview. Full city maps of Tulan tend to be oversimplified in fan resources. They show the harbor and major streets but lose the verticality and water barriers that define the actual experience. A district-level map at 1 inch equals 10 feet scale for interior spaces and 1 inch equals 100 feet for the waterfront area will serve you better. You can always composite them later. The main downside to running Tulan campaigns is player distraction. The city is rich enough in details that players will spend entire sessions negotiating with merchants, exploring temples, and getting involved in guild politics without advancing the main plot. This is not inherently bad. It is the nature of a nexus location. But if you need to keep the story moving, set a hard time limit on social encounters and establish clear consequences for delays. A shipment that arrives three days late because the players were chatting with a dockworker instead of securing passage is a narrative tool, not a failure state.

For resources, the most useful community materials I found were a set of hand-drawn district maps shared on a Midkemia fan forum, an encounter table that accounts for the three merchant factions, and a simple weather and tide tracker spreadsheet. None of these are official products, but they cover the gaps that published materials leave. If you make your own, version control them. I lost two weeks of work when I accidentally overwrote my tide calculation sheet with an older copy. The Tsurani cultural notes in the official sourcebooks are useful but incomplete for a working game. The religion section especially glosses over the practical daily worship routines that would affect NPC behavior in a riverport city. I filled this gap by cross-referencing the priesthood descriptions with basic anthropological models of port city religious practice. Tulan's temples are not just spiritual centers. They function as banks, dispute resolution venues, and informal intelligence networks. A character who understands this will gain access to information that pure combat or stealth approaches cannot provide. One final note on the downloadable content landscape. Some older fan resources for Midkemia are only available as scanned PDFs or in forums that require specific account permissions. If you are collecting materials, archive everything you find immediately. These resources do not tend to stay permanently accessible. I have two complete copies of the best Tulan street-level encounter tables stored across three different cloud services because of this.