I’ve been thinking about a new campaign I’d like to run, with a somewhat cliché, Tolkien-esque basis: a “dark ages” that takes place centuries/millennia after the defeat of a great evil. So lots of ruined castles and towers dotting the overgrown hillsides, with lots of dungeons to explore underneath them.
Like I said, fairly standard/cliché stuff.
I imagine scattered villages and very small towns amid endless forest, and maybe a small castle/hall with a petty chieftain here or there, but no large cities or kingdoms. The thing I struggle to explain, though, is why cities/kingdoms would NOT have re-grown during all this time. That just doesn’t seem very likely. And maybe it’s ok to hand wave that, but maybe coming up with an explanation would provide some more color.
Thus my new idea.
Two features of this world are:
a) As nearly everybody knows, when the Great Evil was defeated, it left a curse on the world that the mighty will always perish. And, sure enough, any time anybody rises to a position of importance and power (in the sense of authority over others, not necessarily character level), the curse strikes them and they die after a long, wasting illness. (That’s not quite the whole story…keep reading.) So one tension in this world is between human ambition and the unknown limit to that ambition (kind of like not being sure how far above the speed limit you can go before you get pulled over.)
b) Although villages and towns are fairly isolated, and the forests in between are perilous, there is an order of sages/healers that wander from place to place dispensing wisdom and lore and healing and sharing news. But they are a decentralized order, intentionally structured so that no member rises to a position of importance, and so far they seem to have evaded the curse.
The “Big Secret” (this would not work well as a published setting) is that the wandering healers are members of an ancient cult, and they are the ones who have been killing off (poisoning, then pretending to care for) anybody who becomes too important, masking their activities by acting benevolent the rest of the time. Before the Big Evil was vanquished, It knew that in order to make a comeback It had to keep humanity weak, so It left behind this cult, with instructions to kill off any potential rivals, and to begin the long, slow process of restoring Itself. The thing is, over the generations the cult has forgotten/distorted the reasons why they are doing all this, including that they’ve totally dropped the ball on bringing their leader back to (un)life.
But the story takes place as things are beginning to change.
Two more parameters:
1) I want it to be a medium or low magic setting, in which nobody knows how to make magic items other than potions and scrolls any more, and spellcasters are generally mistrusted. I might use custom classes to restrict spellcasting PCs, or maybe another system entirely. Maybe even TOR or their 5e variant.
2) Although there’s some storyline to uncover, the campaign is for relatively inexperienced gamers, and I expect will consist primarily of old school dungeon crawls, getting attacked by monsters in the woods, and the like. But…we’ll see where the story goes.
Thoughts? Ideas? Savage attacks on my character and lineage and personal hygiene because this is, after all, the Internet?
