AslanC
Explorer
Normally when I run a fantasy setting it is very Lord of the Rings meets Belgariad meets Willow meets Dragonlance meets Game of Thrones. I bow, what a weird mess of ideas, but needless to say we take it very seriously.
On Sunday I settled down to start yet another one of these campaigns with all new characters and something inside my brain went "twinge" and what came out of my mouth was not what I had planned.
Here now is a summation of that setting and what happened in the first adventure. Please note we are using Pathfinder Beginner Box with custom content from EdoWar's Blog and my own material, and doing it as a E5 style campaign.
Okay so the setting is WIDE open, it's the kind of thing that is very generic but maybe not, think of it more like the WoW, Battle Chasers, Ironwood, Rat Queens, Pathfinder, D&D 4e visuals, Skullkickers material that inspired it.
It is set in the Everwood.
To the north of the Everwood are vikings and barbarians.
To the south and vineyards and fishermen, and still further further south are jungles.
To the east are martial artists, deserts, and mystery.
To the West are knights and feudal lords.
All around is the Empire and the Church, or the Holy Empire.
The Everwood is a GIANT forest that is essentially sort of a "California Central Valley" but much bigger that, and was once the Empire of Galidor, but hasn't been for two thousand years. After some ancient destruction, or maybe they just faded away, the forest returned with a vengeance and taken over the valley. It has rivers, etc... going through it, really wilderlands.
Where it is civilized, the Lower Forest, it is sort of like the Outer Rim in Star Wars. There are homesteads, etc... close to the edges, but within there are almost three tiers of forest. The first tier, closest to the main city is bucolic, even peaceful, though there are still dangers to be avoided. Think the homestead in Legend that Princess Lilly visits and the forest she plays in.
Then there is the next level which is more to the middle of the forest, called the Central Forest, which is more dangerous, the Knights of the Green (rangers and druids) patrolling it, wild tribes of elves, giant spiders, monsters, mayhem, very dangerous, and really no one lives there save for the occasional wizard’s tower or lost cult and their temple.
Finally there is the furthest part of the forest, the opposite end from where the players start and it is not safe at all, it is the Upper Forest. Ancient evils and horrors lurk, the Knights of the Green, who protect so much of the rest of the forest won’t even set foot in here. This area is the “north-western” end of the forest and according to the maps, only further wildlands lay beyond it.
The main city/access point Haven, where people (most non-humans and wizards) go to hide from "the Church!" who seeks to remove them from the world. Haven is a lot like Solace from Dragonlance in safety not necessarily style, or that city in Ironwood where they catch the Northbound snail. Essentially it is built into the forest around a gate house of the ancient Gildorian wall that barred the southern entry to their empire. Now the wall is mostly gone, but there is a good 600 yards of it still visible through the trees and forest here and its gate house the entry to Haven!
Within Haven is all forms of building and construction, with the forest right there. The bows of the trees create lanes and streets, with the buildings nestled between them. Dwarven architecture, elvish design, Halfling burrows, human houses, etc… can all be found in Haven.
Haven though, is not the most important city in the Everwood, that is reserved for the legendary City of Vance.
Vance is a magical city that is controlled wizards and others who also have interest in never being found by the Holy Empire and as such have hidden their wonderous metropolis from the outside world by powerful spells and wards. Vance is also known as the City of Portals, as it supposed that you can reach anywhere in the multiverse from Vance.
That said, you cannot get to Vance without an invite, and invitations are rare.
Back in in Haven, every year there are twenty adventuring companies, who by going on sanctioned quests earn points/tokens with the top team every year getting invited to Vance. Beyond just that top twenty there are countless lesser companies competing for the opening that occurs in the Top Twenty every year.
As you can well imagine companies are destroyed, defeated, disbanded every year, and sometimes more than one opening in the Top Twenty occurs. You roll the dice, you pay the price.
Given that this forest valley was once a MIGHTY empire of millions of inhabitants and countless cities, it is now littered with dungeons, old ruins, forgotten temples, etc... endless amounts of adventures, treasures, and others to aid them in the quest to get to Vance.
In Haven the Adventurers Guild works with the Justiciar (and his Archons) to parcel out quests (and track rankings) through the most famous inn in all the Everwood, the Green Griffon. They maintain as well the Adventurers Guild Hall in Haven and it is a wonderous place with kitchens, healers, blacksmiths, armourers, and even a magic shop (the Dispensary) for its members to take advantage of, for a price of course. Membership costs 10gp per year, and it costs 100gp to register a new Company with them. After that all other services are purchased as per costs in whatever rule book you are using.
The players are currently a new company, just starting out, and comprised of a tinker Gnome gadgeteer from the nearby Tin Hills, a Dwarven prophet of the first (and recently arrived) dwarven god (it should be noted ONLY humans have “gods” in this world, so a dwarf god is considered the height of crazy), and a human mercenary from the southern shores, who weilds a mighty trident and carries a shield from the Last Legion and is very very overwhelmed by all this insanity.
They have teamed up with a rather lascivious female Halfling rogue, an accommodating and reasonable female elf ranger/druid, and a serious, no-nonsense female swordswoman.
They have also had the chance to see the top three Companies in the quest this year;
The Bloody Bastards, a gunslinging Halfling male, a north-man Viking-barbarian right off the cover of an 80s Heavy Metal album, a gigantic female-half-ogre, and an elven high mage right out of “we need a Raistlin type” central casting.
The Silver Moons, a group of Shadow Elves who all wear black robes stitched with silver threads that glow under moonlight and are probably all necromancers, or something wicked, I mean come on Shadow Elves people! Note: Shadow Elves should only be confused with Drow at your own peril.
The Hammerfists, a group of tough-as-nails dwarves who need no spellcasters and no healers, just their thick heads, their mighty hammer, and if all else fails their calloused fists! I am sure they wouldn’t be opposed to biting and poking with their fingers too, also they carry lots of magic items and plenty of healing potions… you know… because they don’t “like” spellcasters, not their results.
To really show the difference in this world, when they went into the Adventurers Guild to register, they saw another Company in the lobby, consisting of a Dragonborn sorcerer, a female Tiefling how might be descended from a succubus or really into fetish wear, and a ten foot tall Brass War Golem. This was taken in stride by the non-humans, but the poor southerner was momentarily shocked by what he saw before him.
So now the heroes have registered their company (temporarily Company 2617 until they make a name) and have undertaken their first quest to defeat a Goblin warband that raided a caravan nearby and retrieve an important gold casque for the proprietor of the Dispensary, Razmusen, who has promised to double the reward for them.
They managed to track the goblins past a farmstead where they killed everyone, the found a large black fang, the dwarf reached out to his god and had a vision of wargs (direwolves), and when the barn where they burned the dead collapsed he saw a fiery image of a bird or a bat, which the southerner confirmed that the goblins of the Bojax Wastes are known to ride giant bats.
They then came upon the goblins, with 4 wolves, 1 hobgoblin, a goblin shaman, 10 guards and 1 boss, performing a ceremony on the golden casque at remnants of a long destroyed temple. They were able to defeat the wolves and 8 of the goblins, before we called it a night and still have to now face the others.
Stay tuned!
On Sunday I settled down to start yet another one of these campaigns with all new characters and something inside my brain went "twinge" and what came out of my mouth was not what I had planned.
Here now is a summation of that setting and what happened in the first adventure. Please note we are using Pathfinder Beginner Box with custom content from EdoWar's Blog and my own material, and doing it as a E5 style campaign.
Okay so the setting is WIDE open, it's the kind of thing that is very generic but maybe not, think of it more like the WoW, Battle Chasers, Ironwood, Rat Queens, Pathfinder, D&D 4e visuals, Skullkickers material that inspired it.
It is set in the Everwood.
To the north of the Everwood are vikings and barbarians.
To the south and vineyards and fishermen, and still further further south are jungles.
To the east are martial artists, deserts, and mystery.
To the West are knights and feudal lords.
All around is the Empire and the Church, or the Holy Empire.
The Everwood is a GIANT forest that is essentially sort of a "California Central Valley" but much bigger that, and was once the Empire of Galidor, but hasn't been for two thousand years. After some ancient destruction, or maybe they just faded away, the forest returned with a vengeance and taken over the valley. It has rivers, etc... going through it, really wilderlands.
Where it is civilized, the Lower Forest, it is sort of like the Outer Rim in Star Wars. There are homesteads, etc... close to the edges, but within there are almost three tiers of forest. The first tier, closest to the main city is bucolic, even peaceful, though there are still dangers to be avoided. Think the homestead in Legend that Princess Lilly visits and the forest she plays in.
Then there is the next level which is more to the middle of the forest, called the Central Forest, which is more dangerous, the Knights of the Green (rangers and druids) patrolling it, wild tribes of elves, giant spiders, monsters, mayhem, very dangerous, and really no one lives there save for the occasional wizard’s tower or lost cult and their temple.
Finally there is the furthest part of the forest, the opposite end from where the players start and it is not safe at all, it is the Upper Forest. Ancient evils and horrors lurk, the Knights of the Green, who protect so much of the rest of the forest won’t even set foot in here. This area is the “north-western” end of the forest and according to the maps, only further wildlands lay beyond it.
The main city/access point Haven, where people (most non-humans and wizards) go to hide from "the Church!" who seeks to remove them from the world. Haven is a lot like Solace from Dragonlance in safety not necessarily style, or that city in Ironwood where they catch the Northbound snail. Essentially it is built into the forest around a gate house of the ancient Gildorian wall that barred the southern entry to their empire. Now the wall is mostly gone, but there is a good 600 yards of it still visible through the trees and forest here and its gate house the entry to Haven!
Within Haven is all forms of building and construction, with the forest right there. The bows of the trees create lanes and streets, with the buildings nestled between them. Dwarven architecture, elvish design, Halfling burrows, human houses, etc… can all be found in Haven.
Haven though, is not the most important city in the Everwood, that is reserved for the legendary City of Vance.
Vance is a magical city that is controlled wizards and others who also have interest in never being found by the Holy Empire and as such have hidden their wonderous metropolis from the outside world by powerful spells and wards. Vance is also known as the City of Portals, as it supposed that you can reach anywhere in the multiverse from Vance.
That said, you cannot get to Vance without an invite, and invitations are rare.
Back in in Haven, every year there are twenty adventuring companies, who by going on sanctioned quests earn points/tokens with the top team every year getting invited to Vance. Beyond just that top twenty there are countless lesser companies competing for the opening that occurs in the Top Twenty every year.
As you can well imagine companies are destroyed, defeated, disbanded every year, and sometimes more than one opening in the Top Twenty occurs. You roll the dice, you pay the price.
Given that this forest valley was once a MIGHTY empire of millions of inhabitants and countless cities, it is now littered with dungeons, old ruins, forgotten temples, etc... endless amounts of adventures, treasures, and others to aid them in the quest to get to Vance.
In Haven the Adventurers Guild works with the Justiciar (and his Archons) to parcel out quests (and track rankings) through the most famous inn in all the Everwood, the Green Griffon. They maintain as well the Adventurers Guild Hall in Haven and it is a wonderous place with kitchens, healers, blacksmiths, armourers, and even a magic shop (the Dispensary) for its members to take advantage of, for a price of course. Membership costs 10gp per year, and it costs 100gp to register a new Company with them. After that all other services are purchased as per costs in whatever rule book you are using.
The players are currently a new company, just starting out, and comprised of a tinker Gnome gadgeteer from the nearby Tin Hills, a Dwarven prophet of the first (and recently arrived) dwarven god (it should be noted ONLY humans have “gods” in this world, so a dwarf god is considered the height of crazy), and a human mercenary from the southern shores, who weilds a mighty trident and carries a shield from the Last Legion and is very very overwhelmed by all this insanity.
They have teamed up with a rather lascivious female Halfling rogue, an accommodating and reasonable female elf ranger/druid, and a serious, no-nonsense female swordswoman.
They have also had the chance to see the top three Companies in the quest this year;
The Bloody Bastards, a gunslinging Halfling male, a north-man Viking-barbarian right off the cover of an 80s Heavy Metal album, a gigantic female-half-ogre, and an elven high mage right out of “we need a Raistlin type” central casting.
The Silver Moons, a group of Shadow Elves who all wear black robes stitched with silver threads that glow under moonlight and are probably all necromancers, or something wicked, I mean come on Shadow Elves people! Note: Shadow Elves should only be confused with Drow at your own peril.
The Hammerfists, a group of tough-as-nails dwarves who need no spellcasters and no healers, just their thick heads, their mighty hammer, and if all else fails their calloused fists! I am sure they wouldn’t be opposed to biting and poking with their fingers too, also they carry lots of magic items and plenty of healing potions… you know… because they don’t “like” spellcasters, not their results.
To really show the difference in this world, when they went into the Adventurers Guild to register, they saw another Company in the lobby, consisting of a Dragonborn sorcerer, a female Tiefling how might be descended from a succubus or really into fetish wear, and a ten foot tall Brass War Golem. This was taken in stride by the non-humans, but the poor southerner was momentarily shocked by what he saw before him.
So now the heroes have registered their company (temporarily Company 2617 until they make a name) and have undertaken their first quest to defeat a Goblin warband that raided a caravan nearby and retrieve an important gold casque for the proprietor of the Dispensary, Razmusen, who has promised to double the reward for them.
They managed to track the goblins past a farmstead where they killed everyone, the found a large black fang, the dwarf reached out to his god and had a vision of wargs (direwolves), and when the barn where they burned the dead collapsed he saw a fiery image of a bird or a bat, which the southerner confirmed that the goblins of the Bojax Wastes are known to ride giant bats.
They then came upon the goblins, with 4 wolves, 1 hobgoblin, a goblin shaman, 10 guards and 1 boss, performing a ceremony on the golden casque at remnants of a long destroyed temple. They were able to defeat the wolves and 8 of the goblins, before we called it a night and still have to now face the others.
Stay tuned!
