Yora
2022-02-25, 08:58 AM
I've been working on a new campaign setting for the last weeks and now started thinking about specific campaign preparation to set up a new game. What I got so far is this:
Several centuries ago, the city states of the Red Sea were united under one ruler, who continued on to conquer most of the surrounding lands. Being a great sorcerer, he ruled for over 200 years during which slaves from the conquered lands made the empire fabulously rich. Eventually he got killed by one of his generals, leading to all the other generals turning first on him and then on each other. During the century of wars that followed, local rulers and nobles build large numbers of strongholds to keep of their enemies, and hidden vaults to store their riches and magic items to be recovered once it was safe again. Many of them died before they got around to that, and the secret locations of the vaults were lost. When the dust eventually settled, there was not much left of the empire, but lots of ruins and sealed vaults still cover the depopulated wilderness. And pretty much everyone was in agreement that the empire was a terrible thing, and that anyone trying to recreate it needs to be stopped immediately. It's every city for itself, and lots of independent small lords and towns. Prime adventuring and treasure hunting environments.
http://spriggans-den.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Six-Lands-2c.jpg
I want to set the campaign in the forests between the Twilight Hills, the Mistwoods, and the Red Sea, with Korla being the central hub. So far it's been a pretty small town of little importance deep in the wilderness, serving only as a central market for the woodsfolk villages of the area. But there is an old imperial road (not shown on the map) that used to run from Leria on the Red Sea in the south to Yarku on the White Sea in the north, and ran straight through Korla. In recent years, there has been some interest from northern merchants from Yarku to use the road for trading high value goods with Leria in the south outside of the normal sailing season, when taking a ship around the long sea route isn't feasible. And southern merchants from Leria are also interesting in getting in on the profit.
The woodsfolk are feeling very ambivalent about that. The northern merchants are mostly former pirates and raiders whose business partners and friends back home are still as much into looting and pillaging as they are in trading (basically vikings), and southern merchants trying to dominate trade on the road accompanied by southern mercenaries feels a lot like the Empire coming back to the forests. That's the overall setup.
Now the question I am dealing with now is how I can make use of this social background in the exploration of ruins, caves, and crypts, and how the PCs exploration and looting of these sites impacts the situation in the town and villages?
In this, I see six main groups that a majority of NPCs in the area would fall into: The Northern Merchants, the Southern Merchants, woodsfolk making a profit working with the Northerners, woodsfolk making a profit working with the Southerners, woodfolk who want all foreign merchants gone, and of course bandits preying on the merchant trains and robbing the woodsfolk of the new wealth they gained trading with the foreigners. And I guess other treasure hunters who also come into the area sensing opportunities from the reopened road creating easier access to yet unexplored ruins.
I think that perhaps all NPCs should be positioned in one of these seven factions when creating them. There is of course a big difference between a farmer who thinks it's nice to have foreign goods become cheaper at the market and a trader who has exclusive agreements with a specific merchant company, or a hunter who thinks that foreign money is going to cause trouble and one who's ambushing and assassinating foreign merchants to force them back out of the woods. But it could be quite useful to help with having various NPCs they players interact with behave differently based on who they have sided with or against in the past. And you can have background events where people from different factions clash with each other in a wide range of ways.
One thing I always thought was really cool about random wilderness encounters with NPCs is that you could have the players run into merchants with their wagons, allowing them to make use of a supply store while still being in the wilderness. That can have a big impact on the party surviving the return trip back to safety when they are badly battered and bruised. The setup here results in those traveling merchants almost certainly being much wealthier than the woodfolk traders in the villages, and having a much higher potential to have valuable special offer items in their stock. You're not going to find plate armor or a magic sword at a village trader in the woods, but a merchant train going from one country to another might. And in turn, traveling between rich cities, these merchants would be much more interested in buying valuable treasures from the PCs. I think there could be quite a lot of really interesting potential in this. Trade posts to restock basic supplies are somewhat common and found in fixed places, while trading treasures and special items would be more randomized. Once the party reaches one of the villages on the main road, they might have to wait a couple of days for a foreign merchant to come through, but then the players will never know who they are going to deal with and what stock of goods to expect. They might start to have preferences for dealing with either Northern or Southern merchants, and they could run into merchants they had dealings with before, which might be a good thing for business or a bad one, depending on how those past interactions went.
Another cool thing someone suggested was that given the whole region was part of the Empire, and that people hid their riches while they fled to other places during the civil wars, the reopening of the road could have nobles from the North or the South become interested in investigating some old documents or maps that have been in their families' possession for generations, which have names on them that they are now hearing mentioned by merchants doing the journey north and south. That's an opportunity to have both treasure maps and NPCs wanting to hire someone to look for lost places that even the locals have never discovered yet.
This campaign concept is still a pretty new idea that I've not spend a lot of thought on yet. Do you have any ideas where I could go in regards to creating ruins and monster lairs that tie into and make use of this specific backdrop? My main goal is to still mostly keep it a fairly straightforward campaign of going into the wilderness to explore dungeons, but also having to occasionally deal with NPCs who have their own various interests in the area and its ruins.
Several centuries ago, the city states of the Red Sea were united under one ruler, who continued on to conquer most of the surrounding lands. Being a great sorcerer, he ruled for over 200 years during which slaves from the conquered lands made the empire fabulously rich. Eventually he got killed by one of his generals, leading to all the other generals turning first on him and then on each other. During the century of wars that followed, local rulers and nobles build large numbers of strongholds to keep of their enemies, and hidden vaults to store their riches and magic items to be recovered once it was safe again. Many of them died before they got around to that, and the secret locations of the vaults were lost. When the dust eventually settled, there was not much left of the empire, but lots of ruins and sealed vaults still cover the depopulated wilderness. And pretty much everyone was in agreement that the empire was a terrible thing, and that anyone trying to recreate it needs to be stopped immediately. It's every city for itself, and lots of independent small lords and towns. Prime adventuring and treasure hunting environments.
http://spriggans-den.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Six-Lands-2c.jpg
I want to set the campaign in the forests between the Twilight Hills, the Mistwoods, and the Red Sea, with Korla being the central hub. So far it's been a pretty small town of little importance deep in the wilderness, serving only as a central market for the woodsfolk villages of the area. But there is an old imperial road (not shown on the map) that used to run from Leria on the Red Sea in the south to Yarku on the White Sea in the north, and ran straight through Korla. In recent years, there has been some interest from northern merchants from Yarku to use the road for trading high value goods with Leria in the south outside of the normal sailing season, when taking a ship around the long sea route isn't feasible. And southern merchants from Leria are also interesting in getting in on the profit.
The woodsfolk are feeling very ambivalent about that. The northern merchants are mostly former pirates and raiders whose business partners and friends back home are still as much into looting and pillaging as they are in trading (basically vikings), and southern merchants trying to dominate trade on the road accompanied by southern mercenaries feels a lot like the Empire coming back to the forests. That's the overall setup.
Now the question I am dealing with now is how I can make use of this social background in the exploration of ruins, caves, and crypts, and how the PCs exploration and looting of these sites impacts the situation in the town and villages?
In this, I see six main groups that a majority of NPCs in the area would fall into: The Northern Merchants, the Southern Merchants, woodsfolk making a profit working with the Northerners, woodsfolk making a profit working with the Southerners, woodfolk who want all foreign merchants gone, and of course bandits preying on the merchant trains and robbing the woodsfolk of the new wealth they gained trading with the foreigners. And I guess other treasure hunters who also come into the area sensing opportunities from the reopened road creating easier access to yet unexplored ruins.
I think that perhaps all NPCs should be positioned in one of these seven factions when creating them. There is of course a big difference between a farmer who thinks it's nice to have foreign goods become cheaper at the market and a trader who has exclusive agreements with a specific merchant company, or a hunter who thinks that foreign money is going to cause trouble and one who's ambushing and assassinating foreign merchants to force them back out of the woods. But it could be quite useful to help with having various NPCs they players interact with behave differently based on who they have sided with or against in the past. And you can have background events where people from different factions clash with each other in a wide range of ways.
One thing I always thought was really cool about random wilderness encounters with NPCs is that you could have the players run into merchants with their wagons, allowing them to make use of a supply store while still being in the wilderness. That can have a big impact on the party surviving the return trip back to safety when they are badly battered and bruised. The setup here results in those traveling merchants almost certainly being much wealthier than the woodfolk traders in the villages, and having a much higher potential to have valuable special offer items in their stock. You're not going to find plate armor or a magic sword at a village trader in the woods, but a merchant train going from one country to another might. And in turn, traveling between rich cities, these merchants would be much more interested in buying valuable treasures from the PCs. I think there could be quite a lot of really interesting potential in this. Trade posts to restock basic supplies are somewhat common and found in fixed places, while trading treasures and special items would be more randomized. Once the party reaches one of the villages on the main road, they might have to wait a couple of days for a foreign merchant to come through, but then the players will never know who they are going to deal with and what stock of goods to expect. They might start to have preferences for dealing with either Northern or Southern merchants, and they could run into merchants they had dealings with before, which might be a good thing for business or a bad one, depending on how those past interactions went.
Another cool thing someone suggested was that given the whole region was part of the Empire, and that people hid their riches while they fled to other places during the civil wars, the reopening of the road could have nobles from the North or the South become interested in investigating some old documents or maps that have been in their families' possession for generations, which have names on them that they are now hearing mentioned by merchants doing the journey north and south. That's an opportunity to have both treasure maps and NPCs wanting to hire someone to look for lost places that even the locals have never discovered yet.
This campaign concept is still a pretty new idea that I've not spend a lot of thought on yet. Do you have any ideas where I could go in regards to creating ruins and monster lairs that tie into and make use of this specific backdrop? My main goal is to still mostly keep it a fairly straightforward campaign of going into the wilderness to explore dungeons, but also having to occasionally deal with NPCs who have their own various interests in the area and its ruins.