As I discussed in Part 1, I'm designing a new fantasy campaign, and I'm seeking your help and feedback. This post I want to concentrate on where the player characters come from.
The Problem
Last post I said that I wanted the campaign to be about exploration into unknown lands. While this sounds simple on the surface, it's actually harder than it seems. Here are some of the issues I see off the top of my head:
- If the lands are unknown, how did the characters happen to be there? Odysseus solves this problem by angering Poseidon so he gets blown off course and is lost. It's not that different for Captain Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager.
- Once I get the characters into the strange land, what do I do about replacement characters? Especially if I want to run the campaign as an open table, I need a way to explain why all these people are here but they don't know where they are.
- How can players have a meaningful backstory if everything and everyone they knew are unreachable?
- What stops the players from walking into the first village they find and asking the locals for a map?
The Solution?
As I hinted above, I think I will solve these problems by transplanting the party, much like Odysseus and Voyager. What's different, though, is that I'm going to transplant not just the player characters, but the entire town where they live. This way there's an entire town of replacement PCs. Not only that, but the PCs' friends and family will have all been transported as well.
So, this is what I've come up with so far. There are two parts: the player facing part, and the "behind the scenes" part.
What the Players Know
The players are native to the town of Crowfield. It is an unassuming town, overseen by Baron Crowfield. There's nothing particularly special about it, other than it was once the home of Delicia the Saintess.
In the center of the village green was a statue of the great cleric, holding a blue-silver sphere between her hands. Legend says that before she died(? vanished?) St. Delicia prophesized that the sphere would be shattered on Crowfield's darkest day. But that was nearly two centuries ago, and the sphere survived many a drunken school boy's attempt to shatter it.
Then, one early winter night, everything changed. The autumn crops had just been brought into the town from the outlying manors and villages, and it was the night of the great winter fete. As midnight approached, there was a sound like no other sound anyone's ever heard. The black night sky was split from west to east with a ribbon of fire that was so hot the snow melted. Fire began to fall from the sky, and ...
...just like that it was the next morning. Everyone was fine. The town was fine. The sphere was shattered.
But beyond the walls of the town is a strange landscape. The fields that were once there are gone, as are the paths and roads.
Lord Crowfield is concerned. He doesn't know what's happening, but he knows the town's stores are only enough to feed the population until next summer. He needs to find out if his vassal manors are still operating so that they can provide food. If not, he needs to find other sources of food.
What the Players Don't Know
While Crowfield was celebrating its winter fete on earth, in the heavens there was a battle. Gob (the god of chaos) attacked and defeated Hume (goddess of law) . The ribbon of fire that everyone saw was Hume's lifeless form falling to the earth.
That was 10,000 years ago.
When the sphere shattered, it locked Crowfield in time. Great civilizations rose and fell around it, completely unaware that the town existed.
It's now a primitive time. Gob still rules the heavens. Isolated settlements exist here and there, but under Gob's dominion there is great distrust. Each settlement is its own tiny kingdom, and tries to be as self sufficient as possible. Any interaction between settlements is as likely to be war as peace.
But why did Crowfield get unlocked in time now? Somewhere, not far away, the body of Hume has arisen...
Conclusion
So that's what I'm working with so far, though of course details are very likely to change as I develop this more. My next post will probably be about the world around Crowfield.
What do you think? Is it stupid? Will it work? Do you have suggestions? I'm listening!
An intriguing setting! Not too familiar with either of the reference stories, though I understand the premise.
ReplyDeleteThe distrustful environment does help to mitigate the map thing (as it could be wrong), and also makes information gathering difficult.
Most of my thoughts at the moment are in regards to specific party actions (i.e. this observation could yield this result, etc.), but that's more the in-the-moment DM decisions.
In terms of general setup, this sounds quite believable. The one thing I could think would need to be done would be to establish the population and size of Crowfield after getting the potential table members identified, so as to not provide too few characters for PC and PC-proxy relationships; neither to have so many as to make the town too generic and lose some of the definition and immersion.