RangerWickett
Legend
I'm starting a new campaign soon, where the PCs live in a village that exists in the middle of nowhere, on a field of rolling hills, near a forest. It rains enough that they can grow crops, even though there's no river within 20 miles; and in the 30 years they've been there the only other culture they found was a group of hostile ogres.
A large part of the campaign will be their efforts to figure out where they are, and range farther out to find other peoples with whom they can ally against a hostile force that will slowly reveal itself over the course of many sessions.
I've got a few ideas in mind for interesting places they can stumble upon in their explorations, but I'd like other suggestions, if possible.
Surroundings
The Valley of Bones
[sblock]A desolate, drought-stricken valley lies to the northeast, which the PCs have come near to but never entered. It was once a lake, and a small city lay on its banks, but the local citizens were tricked into worshiping a demon god, who transformed his followers into ogres and forged a connection to the plane of fire. Now the river that fed the lake boils away, and everyone who did not obey the demon lord was thrown into dry basin to die of thirst and searing heat.
Now the ogres have access to strong fire magic, but they have to go out farther and farther to hunt. The city was once the center of a small culture, which has mostly died out, but a few ogres remember their history and reject their god, and could ally with the PCs. Perhaps if the PCs can make it into the central temple, they could find old maps that point the way to other cultures.
Basically, the image is a sort of post-apocalyptic bronze age city on the shores of a lake that is filled with bones, not water, and which constantly seethes steam. A pit in the center of the lake drops endlessly into the elemental plane of fire, and the ogres offer human sacrifices there.[/sblock]
The Dreaming Forest
[sblock]A few miles to the south is a vast forest, which seems normal enough at first. But if you travel a day and a night due south, when you sleep you might experience strange dreams, and awaken in an eerie wood where the animals are intelligent and can all talk to each other, and mighty beasts guard a sinkhole cave where some powerful entity sleeps.
The forest itself is just a dream of this entity, made manifest by the being's powerful psionic abilities. If you fall asleep at the edge of the sinkhole, for a few brief moments in the liminal state between consciousness and dream, you can speak to the entity, possibly even slip into its dreams and influence the physical world.
Like any good dreamscape, the place follows magical logic. You can end up across the forest in an instant if you step through the wrong tree hollow, and if you do not have a good sense of self you might find your appearance drifting until you are someone else.
A githyanki exile from the astral plane found himself lost in these woods with his son, and he sought to gain control of the psionic energy here. In one vast grove he is slowly mastering reality. He can control gravity now, and eventually he hopes to capture the sleeping entity's power for his own. The native beings of the forest, from woodland critters to monstrous treants and shapeshifting dryads, are being terrorized by the outsider.[/sblock]
Distant Locales
The Riven Isles
[sblock]You ever play Riven? Five islands where the world is slowly tearing itself apart? Okay, now add in a pinch of Magic's Zendikar for floating islands, and some wild elemental energies, and you've got a deadly location.
If the game goes for the long run, I plan to have the party cross over from their small subcontinent to the larger world where there are greater civilizations. But their continent lies across a huge rift, where the "tectonic plates" of a hollow world fall apart. Strange elemental currents result in a string of islands stretching between the two continents, with a few safe pathways of water, but mostly it's just open space, and a 4,000 mile plummet to the center of the world.
So, like, imagine volcanic islands floating in space, with thin streams of navigable water, like ribbons a hundred feet wide, which don't always stay together.
What would be on those islands? Crazy wizards? Giant monsters? Bizarre elemental manifestations? Pirates?[/sblock]
The rest are mostly half-formed ideas.
Time. A place (cave? badlands?) where time 'skips.' Inspired by the game Braid, there are occasional pockets of temporal weirdness where, when you enter, you get a couple rounds to act. Then you get kicked back to just before you entered, while a vague image of you moves on and does whatever you did the first time through. So if there's a trap, you can run forward, spring it and die, then pop back a round or two and watch as your shade dies, but leaves the trap sprung and safe.
Maybe the villains there have learned a trick so they can use the local temporal oddities, and share actions. Each round, any of them can skip a standard action to give one of their allies an extra standard action.
Shadows. A place (library? another forest?) coterminous with the plane of shadows, where physical action is weak, but your shadow interacts strongly with the environment. So you could hold a torch behind a buddy, and that buddy could swipe his shadow arms at a boulder to knock it over.
The Ten Commandments. A large city, later in the campaign, where they have a written legal code, and if you ever break any of these laws, the enforcers know immediately, and they can restrain you with overwhelming force. The trick is to play by the letter of the law, and distort the spirit. Like, 'Thou shalt not kill' still lets you trick someone into killing themselves, or stealing their soul and putting a demon in their body.
Graveyard dragon. I just love the mental image of a flooded graveyard, the headstones unevenly poking out of the ground, and then a dragon rising up, the granite panels embedded in its flesh like the plates of a stegosaurus. Somehow the PCs could interact with the spirits of the dead in those headstones, perhaps as a way to defeat an otherwise overpoweringly strong dragon.
So, got any ideas to share?
A large part of the campaign will be their efforts to figure out where they are, and range farther out to find other peoples with whom they can ally against a hostile force that will slowly reveal itself over the course of many sessions.
I've got a few ideas in mind for interesting places they can stumble upon in their explorations, but I'd like other suggestions, if possible.
Surroundings
The Valley of Bones
[sblock]A desolate, drought-stricken valley lies to the northeast, which the PCs have come near to but never entered. It was once a lake, and a small city lay on its banks, but the local citizens were tricked into worshiping a demon god, who transformed his followers into ogres and forged a connection to the plane of fire. Now the river that fed the lake boils away, and everyone who did not obey the demon lord was thrown into dry basin to die of thirst and searing heat.
Now the ogres have access to strong fire magic, but they have to go out farther and farther to hunt. The city was once the center of a small culture, which has mostly died out, but a few ogres remember their history and reject their god, and could ally with the PCs. Perhaps if the PCs can make it into the central temple, they could find old maps that point the way to other cultures.
Basically, the image is a sort of post-apocalyptic bronze age city on the shores of a lake that is filled with bones, not water, and which constantly seethes steam. A pit in the center of the lake drops endlessly into the elemental plane of fire, and the ogres offer human sacrifices there.[/sblock]
The Dreaming Forest
[sblock]A few miles to the south is a vast forest, which seems normal enough at first. But if you travel a day and a night due south, when you sleep you might experience strange dreams, and awaken in an eerie wood where the animals are intelligent and can all talk to each other, and mighty beasts guard a sinkhole cave where some powerful entity sleeps.
The forest itself is just a dream of this entity, made manifest by the being's powerful psionic abilities. If you fall asleep at the edge of the sinkhole, for a few brief moments in the liminal state between consciousness and dream, you can speak to the entity, possibly even slip into its dreams and influence the physical world.
Like any good dreamscape, the place follows magical logic. You can end up across the forest in an instant if you step through the wrong tree hollow, and if you do not have a good sense of self you might find your appearance drifting until you are someone else.
A githyanki exile from the astral plane found himself lost in these woods with his son, and he sought to gain control of the psionic energy here. In one vast grove he is slowly mastering reality. He can control gravity now, and eventually he hopes to capture the sleeping entity's power for his own. The native beings of the forest, from woodland critters to monstrous treants and shapeshifting dryads, are being terrorized by the outsider.[/sblock]
Distant Locales
The Riven Isles
[sblock]You ever play Riven? Five islands where the world is slowly tearing itself apart? Okay, now add in a pinch of Magic's Zendikar for floating islands, and some wild elemental energies, and you've got a deadly location.
If the game goes for the long run, I plan to have the party cross over from their small subcontinent to the larger world where there are greater civilizations. But their continent lies across a huge rift, where the "tectonic plates" of a hollow world fall apart. Strange elemental currents result in a string of islands stretching between the two continents, with a few safe pathways of water, but mostly it's just open space, and a 4,000 mile plummet to the center of the world.
So, like, imagine volcanic islands floating in space, with thin streams of navigable water, like ribbons a hundred feet wide, which don't always stay together.
What would be on those islands? Crazy wizards? Giant monsters? Bizarre elemental manifestations? Pirates?[/sblock]
The rest are mostly half-formed ideas.
Time. A place (cave? badlands?) where time 'skips.' Inspired by the game Braid, there are occasional pockets of temporal weirdness where, when you enter, you get a couple rounds to act. Then you get kicked back to just before you entered, while a vague image of you moves on and does whatever you did the first time through. So if there's a trap, you can run forward, spring it and die, then pop back a round or two and watch as your shade dies, but leaves the trap sprung and safe.
Maybe the villains there have learned a trick so they can use the local temporal oddities, and share actions. Each round, any of them can skip a standard action to give one of their allies an extra standard action.
Shadows. A place (library? another forest?) coterminous with the plane of shadows, where physical action is weak, but your shadow interacts strongly with the environment. So you could hold a torch behind a buddy, and that buddy could swipe his shadow arms at a boulder to knock it over.
The Ten Commandments. A large city, later in the campaign, where they have a written legal code, and if you ever break any of these laws, the enforcers know immediately, and they can restrain you with overwhelming force. The trick is to play by the letter of the law, and distort the spirit. Like, 'Thou shalt not kill' still lets you trick someone into killing themselves, or stealing their soul and putting a demon in their body.
Graveyard dragon. I just love the mental image of a flooded graveyard, the headstones unevenly poking out of the ground, and then a dragon rising up, the granite panels embedded in its flesh like the plates of a stegosaurus. Somehow the PCs could interact with the spirits of the dead in those headstones, perhaps as a way to defeat an otherwise overpoweringly strong dragon.
So, got any ideas to share?
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