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Tvtyrant
2018-02-23, 12:47 PM
I'm planning to run a Tethyr Campaign based loosely on the original description in Empires of Sands.

Principle set up: A decade ago a series of bloody coups ended the royal bloodline, scattered the armies of Tethyr and power devolved to local governors and mayors. The four major cities are continuing to pretend the nation exists, and the lack of strong surrounding states has kept the country from invasion so far, but the borders are crumbling.

Monsters are gathering in the mountains and raiding outlying territories, pirates have ended shipping out of the cities, surrounding nations are preparing to annex pieces of the country, and the rulers of the four principle city-provinces are each preparing for civil war as the nation must be unified.

Thinking of running this in chapters:
1. Dealing with town bandits and local threats (levels 1-3).
2. Red Hand of Doom
3. Clearing out Pirates
4. Reclaiming the Crown of Tethyr, symbolic of leadership to convince foreign nations not to invade. Held by undead former king.
5. Unify nation, several possible ways (level 13).

2, 3 and 4 can be done in any order really, just involves making threats better or worse.

So questions I have are:
How much down time/sandbox stuff would I need to include between chapters?
Is there a less generic way to run chapter 1?
Are there any good pirate modules I could use as a base?

Yora
2018-02-23, 02:48 PM
Since it's organised in chapters you can have as many days or years pass between them as you want. I would go with a couple of years to make the PCs' rise from green nobodies to legendary heroes feel more plausible.
You could give them the option to state what things they want to do after the conclusion of each adventure to tidy up what they regard as loose ends. But in that case, the arrangements they make during that time should be reflected in the next adventure. Like friends they made taking up the roles of fitting NPCs in the adventure and stuff like that.

Fighting raiders becomed much more interesting if they are not generically evil but simply another fragment of the kingdom trying to get by in the current situation. And the domain the PCs are from competing for valuable land and resources. The soldiers might be doing evil things, but the common folk simply want their land protected from outside agressors and could turn against the PCs for being agents of a rival domain. We got a fractured state after all. Much that can be done with it?

How is fighting pirates a step up from the Red Hand of Doom?

Tvtyrant
2018-02-23, 04:53 PM
Since it's organised in chapters you can have as many days or years pass between them as you want. I would go with a couple of years to make the PCs' rise from green nobodies to legendary heroes feel more plausible.
You could give them the option to state what things they want to do after the conclusion of each adventure to tidy up what they regard as loose ends. But in that case, the arrangements they make during that time should be reflected in the next adventure. Like friends they made taking up the roles of fitting NPCs in the adventure and stuff like that.

That seems good. It lets me dodge WBL issues too, if I over monty haul during a chapter I just give them a WBL to meet after the time skip.



Fighting raiders becomed much more interesting if they are not generically evil but simply another fragment of the kingdom trying to get by in the current situation. And the domain the PCs are from competing for valuable land and resources. The soldiers might be doing evil things, but the common folk simply want their land protected from outside agressors and could turn against the PCs for being agents of a rival domain. We got a fractured state after all. Much that can be done with it?

It also brings up the issue of legitimacy. If the police start demanding taxes after the government collapses, who has the legal right here?


How is fighting pirates a step up from the Red Hand of Doom?

I could do it first as well. It is pretty easy to add krakens and dragonturtles to the pirates to move them up, or move down to low level pirates. The big things I want to keep are that the pirates are run by a coven of hags that scry on merchant ships and themselves are part of the zhentarim. They live on Candleskull Island, which is a gigantic skull of a primordial with a lighthouse rising out of it.

I also wanted to make the lighthouse a death laser from ancient times that the hags have tapped into, which might be too 1950s mad scientist but makes the pirates more of a threat as you can't just sail up in a warship.