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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 4989278" data-attributes="member: 694">The world called Gaia is very much like our Earth was in the early part of the 19th century... except, of course, that Gaia boasts the presence of magic, faeries, dragons, and other supernatural wonders.  One of Gaia's continents, Arcadia, is a land of many nations, most of them in the midst of an Industrial Revolution and an explosion of modern scientific understanding and technological development.  Driven by coal and steam, clockwork and electricity, the world is changing with breathtaking rapidity.  Some of the elder races, especially long-lived elves and fays, can't quite wrap their heads around this new world being created by men, gnomes, dwarves, and other races more technologically inclined.  In the center of Arcadia is a country called Midjard, the middle-country, a region of several small and independent kingdoms.  Some of these kingdoms are well known and rather powerful.  Spielberg is famous for its military, and Handelstad is famous for its wealth.  Daemmerung is known for the power of its wizards, and Aelfheim for the wisdom of its sages.  But the kingdom of Dreiseen (which is known in the Common Tongue as the kingdom of Threelakes) is not particularly outstanding for any of these reasons.  In fact, it is quite the out-of-the-way little region, populated by farmers and fishers, and so far, little touched by the marvels of modern technological progress.In the western part of Dreiseen is a lowland, a large valley some twenty miles wide running east-west and perhaps eighty miles long running north-south.  This valley is known as the Donnerreiss (the Thunder-Rift).  Much of the Donnerresiss is wilderness.  There are no cities, only a few villages, and many rough and rugged parts which rest in monster hands.  It is into the wilds of the Donnerreiss that your party has ventured, looking for excitement and profit.  Your first destination: the village of Kleine, on the southern shore of Lake Oestrel.  A massive waterfall called the Donnerfall (its pervasive roar gives the whole valley of the Donnerreiss its name) plunges into Lake Oestrel, after which a lazy flow called the Drache River wends down from the lake (about where Kleine sits), and then southward through the valley and eventually all the way to the mighty Gylden River, at the very southern edge of the Kingdom of Dreiseen, many leagues distant.You arrive in Kleine on a crisp autumn morning, brown leaves crunching beneath your feet, frost coating the tips of grass-blades, wisps of your own breath made visible for a heartbeat.  The sky is blue and cloudless, the sun bright.  And yet, you come to this village well aware of the rumors.  Trouble stirs in the east.  Homesteads destroyed, crops and possessions pillaged, farmers and their families either slain or kidnapped or force to flee.  And some claim to have seen goblins in the hills.  Goblins!  Above ground, and in broad daylight at times!  Such a thing is unheard of, even in such a wilderness as the Donnerreiss.  After all, goblins are things of legend.  At least as far as any of you know, nobody has seen a real goblin in hundreds and hundreds of years.  It's possible that they might not even exist at all, and that the farmers are merely jumping at shadows.  Or perhaps the threat is real, but farms are being destroyed by ordinary, mortal bandits, and not by spooks and myths and legends.  Whatever the case, you have come to Kleine in search of adventure.  This village is little more than a crossroads and a collection of small buildings, most of them sturdy and tile-roofed, but still very rustic in appearance and construction.  The roads are dirt-paved, and there isn't even so much as a lamppost in the village square!  Just a stone well where the two dirt highways intersect.  But one building does stand out beyond the others, a large and relatively new-looking three-storey home.  This, you suppose, must be the burgomaster's manor.  But surely, the leader of a village like Kleine would be too busy to meet with a ragtag band of adventurers, right?</blockquote>

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