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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 7277771" data-attributes="member: 20323">You've painted a good "macro" large-scale view of the game you want to run. Your immediate next step - before putting work into the details - should be to confer with your players if that's a kind of game they'd want to play. When pitching campaign ideas, I've found it best to distill your idea down to an "elevator pitch" sentence (and then if that hooks them, you can have a paragraph or a couple paragraphs of overarching description & anything the players would need to know, eg. regarding character creation).If they're on board, then you get to drill down to details. There are many approaches you can take, but personally when dealing with factions / intrigue, I like to do faction write-ups: What is the nation's character, leadership, government, population, main imports/exports, defenses, religions, whether they finance rival adventuring parties, goals, beliefs, etc. For example, take the Omerian Empire. Since it's a dwarven empire that, I'm presuming, is roughly equally powerful to an elven nation and dragonkin nation, that indicates to me that it's either a byzantine empire in decline OR that there are treaties/inter-marriages/religious beliefs or other factors complicating the dwarven armies moving on Aberwynn. I like the idea of a byzantine dwarven empire, one riddled with ancient dwarf-holds beneath the foothills, a curse of debauched madness afflicting increasing numbers of the aristocracy (a devil cult maybe?), and dwarven thieves' and assassins' guilds operating in the shadows to shift the balance of power. "Our dwarves use poison." might be a tongue-in-cheek motto of one of the Omerian regiments. Perhaps the Omerian Empire, now that it's in its twilight, faces the dilemma of vassal peoples – humans, halflings, and others who were assimilated into the empire – beginning to seek greater freedoms (and greater control of their borders & taxes). So why does the Omerian Empire want Aberwynn so much? Well, war is a great way to distract the populace from trouble on the home front...doubly so if they use propaganda declaring Aberwynn a site of significance to minority races/religions within the empire... The Omerian Emperor might observe an almost quarantine-like existence, fearing contracting the madness spreading through his lands, leading to many calling him the "Sequestered Emperor" behind closed doors. Concerned about the cost of war & rising warlords using the war as a vehicle to propel themselves to power eclipsing his own, the Emperor might finance adventurers (preferably dwarves or at least dwarf-friends) to explore Aberwynn ahead of the military invasion. A great twist would be if the dwarves find something in ruined Aberwynn which could threaten their empire's dwindling stability, such as evidence of a dwarven warlord committing genocide against the gnomes or another minority, and then try to cover it up!More broadly, you'll also want to think about how you want to implement "verge of war" – is that going to be a narrative device you use to introduce events as you see fit, is it going to involve a countdown timer of some kind, is it going to involve a detailed victory point type system?</blockquote>

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