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Dragon Empire Campaign Building – Lazy GM Prep
Fri, 20 Sep 2024
Mike begins his campaign prep for his Dragon Empire Midgard-based Tales of the Valiant campaign! Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Podcast Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books Tales of the Valiant Midgard Worldbook
Hey friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish. Today we are going to have a kind of a special episode of Lazy GM Prep. In this show, I normally go through steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master while preparing for my Sunday role-playing game, but my game has been cancelled. So instead, I'm going to do some homework for our next campaign.
Our next campaign is going to be set in Midgard, the world of Midgard by Kobold Press, and specifically in the Dragon Empire off to the east. So we are going to go through what steps I have... in order to start preparing for a brand new campaign.
Some of the things that I plan on doing today is building a giant faction list of all of the different factions in the area, having a general idea about where the campaign is going to start, get some big ideas about sort of the friction points that exist in the world, in this particular region of the world, so that I have a general idea of what kind of adventures might be fun.
Maybe a list of the kinds of adventures that we would actually run here.
probably at least a paragraph about what the first adventure will be, like narrowing down to what's the first session going to be like, and putting together a session zero guide so that I have something I can give to the players before we begin to talk about what the campaign is going to be like and kind of set the ground rules for all of it.
So I don't know if we're going to get through all that today, but we're going to try. I actually, I think we can get through some of it. It is also going to be my first time that I'm using Obsidian for my prep, so I have a little separate window here for Obsidian because we're going to be building out this campaign using Obsidian rather than using Notion. I am not dissing Notion.
Notion is just fine, but I have really enjoyed using Obsidian for adventure and campaign planning, and I plan to do more of it because I like having local files not being dependent upon a server, and they're already in Markdown rather than having to convert to Markdown. So I find that to be very useful, and that's been very useful for my game so far. So we are going to get started.
One of the things that I did is I already did some homework up front. And in particular, I already read through a lot of the material for the draft. So this is all from the Midgard World Book. Midgard World Book is one of my favorite campaign source books. I've now run two campaigns in it. This will be my third campaign using the Midgard World Book.
it is really really big rich huge tons of material and what i recommend is doing what i've been doing is focusing on a particular area whether it's the crossroads whether it's the northern reaches whether you know whatever region you pick the western wastes you know whatever you want to pick you can kind of focus down on that and i thought you know the dragon empire sounds cool a because there are no real adventures taking place there there's no big campaign source book
running adventures in the dragon empire. So it's kind of like uncharted land. So there is a 32 page section of the Midgard world book that covers the dragon empire, also known as the Maharadi empire. And I read all of this and took some notes and got some general ideas of what's there. So I already have some stuff brewing in my head.
And the first, so, you know, when we talk about like lazy campaign planning and stuff like that,
and you know what's the big focus point of the campaign we're going to do all of this today we're going to walk through those those steps of like building out a campaign but one big piece particularly when you're running in a a published setting is absorbing the material and it doesn't seem lazy to have to sit down and read 30 pages of source material but it's really valuable if you're going to run it in there it behooves you to take some time to dive into the lore that exists for that region
So that you can kind of internalize it. You can get ideas from it. You can capitalize off of all of the stuff that other people have already put together in this and see the kind of stuff like, wow, that's really cool. I can't wait to do that. Or, wow, that's something I really don't want to do.
So you have, you know, there's a lot of value in diving into the material that exists for a given campaign setting, which is what I did yesterday. Yesterday was Saturday. It was my day off. And I said, the one thing I want to do is I want to just relax and take some time and read through the Dragon Empire and this stuff and do that. Something else that I did over and I captured over my...
Something else I did was I went through other books as well. So I have a lot of Kobol Press books, and I went through and did some searching in these various books and found other groups of Dragon Empire-y stuff that exist in other books that they have. Like a group known as the Azure Band, which I think is a criminal organization in the Dragon Empire, is available in Warlock Grimoire 4.
Magnificent Sultans in the Maharadi Empire is written by Wolfgang Bauer in Warlock Grimoire 1. Into the Dragon Empire, Maria and the Islands is in Warlock Grimoire 1. I want to read about that. And so I haven't read all of these, but I put them together so I know where they are. The Doom and the Pillars, Warlock Grimoire 2. Galvanix, Warlock Grimoire 2.
Dancing with Dragons, Intrigues of the Maharadi in Warlock Grimoire 3. Barbarian Subclass, Path of the Dragon by Warlock Grimoire 3. I'm probably not going to add that subclass into my group. But there's probably some background material there. Dragon Incursions in the Southland.
So the Southlands World Book actually had a fair bit of materials too, because it sits right to the west of the Dragon Empire and is a common state of war. So there's a lot of stuff going. And that's where you have like the Nurian Battles where, you know, when there was a great defeat of the Dragon Empire. So I started to get together a bunch of lore.
for just to kind of get stirring around in my head. It doesn't have to be perfect. I just want to have an idea where this stuff is, what it's kind of about, so that when I want to fill out other parts of the campaign, I can do so. But I don't want to lose track of like, hey, this is about five or six character. There's about six characters.
Operating in this area so what's going to be going on in and around those six characters what's happening there and I already have an idea that I want to do for that too which is I really like the idea of them being at a way station essentially a waypoint on a traveling path. in kind of an arid, deserty sort of area where they are operating around a well.
I'm stealing this right out of Lawrence of Arabia, the idea that having a well with water is life in the desert and you'll kill people over it. And I kind of like this idea that they operate around a well. And I like the idea, again, I'm just sort of stirring ideas around in my head, nothing solid, nothing super solid yet. So the well and operating around the well So I sort of like this idea.
Oh, and I want them to operate. So I wanted the characters to operate on the fringe of the empire. So they are not part of the empire and they are not right in the heart of the empire. They're on the outer edge of the empire. And you can almost think of this like Tatooine, right? I was talking to my wife about this. It's sort of like Tatooine.
It's okay to say that you might join the rebellion if you're on Tatooine because nobody's really in charge of Tatooine. Right. There isn't like a local governor of the empire who's managing things and has troops walking around all the time. If the empire shows up and roughs people up, nobody really says anything. But like that idea that you're sort of on the edge.
So the idea that the characters are beginning at this way station, maybe there's like 50 people around them. Maybe it's just enough to be not quite a town. And also you could do some fun deadwood kind of stuff here, too. I always love deadwood. So that you could, you know, it could be sort of an area that operates. It's still under the control of the Dragon Empire, kind of, but they're not around.
And maybe there's like a local baron who comes by every couple of weeks and he's a real pain in the ass. And everybody pretends like, oh, yeah, no, we're doing everything you want. And then he goes away. OK, back to business. Right. So it's like when your regional manager shows up at Babbage's. Like, oh, quick, clean. So I like the idea that it's under the Empire, but not really.
And it operates sort of independently. So that's an idea that I dig, that the characters operate independently. The other thing is I sort of want the campaign to go in the direction of how to thwart the Empire, how to thwart and destabilize the Empire without drawing so much attention that dragons show up and burn you to death.
So I want to figure out how to narrow that idea down, the seeds of rebellion sort of idea of low-grade rebellion. So causing little problems that local regional lords have to deal with, but aren't so big that whoever the local dragon is. So I think that that could be a lot of fun.
So I think what we're going to do is we're going to, in my Notion notes here, I'm going to create a new note and we are going to call this Dragon Empire campaign notes. I know I said, I called this one campaign notes and research notes. So we're going to rename this to just research because that's really all I put there. And so we need for our, let's, we can actually go to return here.
See what return has to say. In Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, if we go to lazy campaign planning, building a lazy campaign. So in chapter 16 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, we have building a lazy campaign. And it talks about that you have a spiral campaign development.
Rather than building out huge expansive plot of 50 sessions of material, you say, no, where are the characters going to start and what's going on right around them? That's what we want to focus on. Rather than building up the whole campaign world. Now, the good news is, because I'm using the Midgard world book, I already have like a big campaign built around it.
I already have some of the big ideas. And this idea that there are nine dragon emperors, right? These single dragons, they have a name, we'll look up the name, that rule over everything, but they have one central sultan who controls everything. And it's like a figurehead sultan.
So they really know the dragons are really in charge, but they've put this one sultan who's in charge of the whole thing.
And that way they have one button they can push in order to affect the entire empire, which is built among these different dragon lords, which are actual dragons that have made this agreement, a pact among themselves to rule this empire that they will not encroach upon each other's lands or each other's stuff. And instead, they'll have one central thing.
And that way they can expand their empires outwards, which they did to about the final degree that they could. I think there are originally 12 dragons and now there's nine. We're going to have to figure out who the original 12 were and then also who the nine are now, because we're going to use those in our faction list and stuff like that.
But that's the general campaign setting is, you know, is set in the dragon empire. But we're really focusing down in the characters. And then we have the campaign hook. Like, what is the major hook here? And if we go back to Obsidian here, we want a campaign hook. So, you know, malicious compliance, I really like. I like that term. That's pretty funny.
And, you know, thwart the, you know, thwart the dragon empire without a dragon showing up and burning you to death. You know, that's not, that's not a great campaign. That's not a great campaign hook, you know, rebellion and survival and rebellion under the dragon empire. That's, that's like an idea, you know?
And, and when I think about like, and we're just going to drop in some like, you know, adventure ideas would be like steel treasure cash headed to one of the dragon treasuries. It get like someone else did it. Right, so that's kind of a fun one. Finding old artifacts valuable to the dragon empire before the empire finds them themselves.
Destabilizing the armies headed to war with Nuria Natal from other regions. From other regions. Rescuing rebels from draconic imprisonment. hunting down capable hunting down artifacts capable of what destroying or destabilizing draconic rule so an interesting thing about this whole idea is that if you have nine dragon lords so the whole hierarchy as it exists inside the dragon empire is
is you have nine dragon lords, which are like super powerful dragons. We can take a look here. Let's go back to our, and go to the Midgard world book. And they have sort of a, here's the stat. And they have the dragon lords, right? These are the dragon lords. So actually we're gonna take these dragon lords and we're gonna drop them into our campaign prep here.
We're just getting our formatting correct here for the dragon lords. And I hold onto the ability to change these as I want. I kind of like the idea that they're all basically ancient dragons. Although a couple of adults is not bad because then they're actually something you might face and defeat in the campaign.
If they're all ancient, you'd have to have like super high level characters before you could face them. Atesha, the Heart of the Desert. Glavistus, the Scourge. Ibalan, the Illustrious. Lashmarak Talashish. Marat, the Founder. Parsis, the Hidden. Ruzgar, the Dragon of Fog and Hungers. And Satara al-Baldestani. Oh, and there's one more. And Yiraz Zah. Is that nine? One, two, three, four, five.
So that is the nine dragons. They are not necessarily all evil. In fact, one specifically says, so there's a few neutral. Let's see. One, two, three, four, five, six of them are evil. One of them is good. Yeraz Azah, the female known as the female old wind silver dragon, wind dragon, a silver dragon. Finally says old wind. We should say ancient, right? Now, here's the interesting bit.
So you have one that's lawful good, but the law is the law of the dragon empire. The law that they subscribe to is the law of the alliance that's going on here. So you're not going to necessarily be able to convince her that you can, that she should join your side and disrupt the empire. you know, like the manipulation of the dragon empire is going to have to be pretty careful. So there's that.
I'm going to put, so I actually have a faction list here that I'm putting together. And we're going to put the dragons in this faction list. And that way, one of the features, this is not something in return, is I think for a campaign, it really helps to have faction lists.
And a faction list is essentially a numbered list of different kinds of factions in your campaign that you can roll on when you want to kind of tie a faction to something. And what you can do with this is you can tie it to monuments, you can tie it to items, you can tie it to characters, NPCs, other things. You can always sort of like roll on these lists.
in order to tie your game to particular factions. So, for example, we have the eight gods, and I did a little bit of, you know, I did some pre-work on this yesterday. The eight gods that are relevant to the Dragon Empire, and that's Baal, Vashara the Tormentor, 40-Fingered Nekresh, Four-Faced Azuran, Mammon, Varduzain, Veles the World Serpent, and Segatan.
So I have eight gods in the area and I could even have like other gods that I could pull from other elements. And then there could be, you know, cause we could, I could also throw the Southern, you know, I could put a list of the Southern gods because there might be monuments to the Southern gods found in this particular region. And then I have the sultans and the sultana, right?
The current, and I have two, but I have that book that Wolfgang Bauer had written with the other sultans in it. And we could, I can tie those in as well. So this faction list is cool because I can roll on it. I can actually like, they could find a monument in the woods and I can roll on this list and then, ah, that's a monument to Mammon. And then I could have information about Mammon.
So I really think that these faction lists are super useful. Let's go back to our campaign notes here. Is the campaign hook enough? My players are already on board, but I'd really like to kind of refine what that campaign hook is. And it would be great if I could get it down to two words. What are the two words? that define destabilizing tyranny. And it could be destabilize.
Destabilize the tyranny of the Dragon Empire is kind of a fun idea. And some ideas about the characters, and let's see, we're gonna drop this in here. We're brainstorming, right? Not everything has to fit perfectly. So the characters in the Dragon Empire could be freedom fighters, They could be spies from other regions. They could be mercenaries. They could be scouts, trackers, and caravan guards.
What else could they be? Like what else makes sense for the characters in this area? One thing we can do, so I didn't mention this, but this whole campaign is gonna be built using Tales of the Valiant as our core book. So we can actually take a look at Tales of the Valiant here and we can look at, so we can look at heritage and see what kind of heritages make sense.
We know, oh, let's see, I wanna do scrolling.
so let's take a look at that lineage we'll go through the whole like you know aside from class because we generally know so we have beast kins that makes sense dwarves would make sense elves would make sense humans make sense kobolds make sense orcs make sense cyridians are from different planes sure small folk and cyridians i guess are kind of like your tieflings but they're also they could be different they could be like asimarian kind of things
Small folk are your, I guess, are your gnomes and dwarves, right? They don't have a, I'm sorry, gnomes and halflings. Interesting. Heritages, we have anointed, which would be supernatural connection to extraplanar creatures or cosmic forces. So one thing about our land that I want to jot down is that there's a big connection to the elements.
So when we talk about other worlds, rather than being like really strange other worlds, it could be like an elemental heritage, right? Anointed cloud heritage have a tie to arcane magic. In that case, you could have come from the west, from Nur-i-Natal. Cosmopolitan, come from one of the cities. You could come from any one of the dragon cities. Cottage would be from agriculture and agrarian.
Diaspora, displaced communities. So that's certainly a possibility because there have been numerous areas that have been destroyed. Fireforged, that definitely works because there are entire regions that are fireforged here. Grove, tied to the forest. Nomadic, that works really well. Salvager works really well. Slayer works really well. Stone heritage, again, a good elemental one.
The supplicant heritage, you could be like, hey, I used to follow the Dragon Empire. The supplicant works really well. The vexed, an interesting connection to the Dragon Empire with the vexed. Wildlands, same sort of thing. So those all work. And then backgrounds, adherents.
Yeah, you could be an adherent to like any of the gods, perhaps other Southern gods than the ones that are worshiped here, because most of the gods that are worshiped here are kind of dark and mean looking. There'd be some other ones. Talent and artist, that all makes sense.
A courtier, like you could have been, so the idea that you could be an ex-member of a former person in the, that could certainly work. What I want to avoid, though, because I want to steer... So am I being too railroad-y with the campaign? I don't want the characters to be operating on behalf of the Dragon Empire. That sounds kind of both boring to me and not the kind of campaign I want to run.
I really like the idea that the Dragon Empire, that you're operating underneath the Dragon Empire... But that you recognize its danger and its corruption and the poor way that it treats its people and want to thwart that. You know, that your goal, if we're going to write down sort of like, you know, your character.
you know the the one bond i i do this and i i think this works really well is you want to make it really clear you and you work with your companions side by side with your companions you work to thwart to protect the people pressed under the claw So that's not a little bit of, you know, that's probably a little too focused on the heroic side. So what's another option there?
You and your companions and your trusted companions work together to survive, thrive, and thwart. the tyrannical, the tyrannical rulership. So you work together to survive, thrive, and thwart the tyrannical. Well, that doesn't make sense because you don't survive the tyrannical. Yeah, survive the tyrannical, thrive under, thrive within.
You and your trusted companions work together to survive, thrive within, and thwart the tyrannical rulership of the dragon empire. So that's nice because it leaves a few options, right? Some of the options can be like, hey, because I don't mind the idea of like scoundrels, right? The dirty, rotten scoundrels of the dragon empire. That's kind of a fun theme, right?
You know, the dirty, rotten scoundrels of the dragon empire is kind of fun. And so one of the ideas is like, I think it's okay. As long as generally speaking, the characters all have a reason to kind of hate the dragon empire of the hated characters.
As long as they have a reason to kind of hate the Dragon Empire and want to thwart the Dragon Empire, and they're not trying to fix it, and they don't believe in it. I think it's okay if they're out for their own benefit. I think it's okay if they're out to just manage to survive.
but maybe i mean survival may not be enough right if you want to say like if it's just surviving the tyrannical rulership of the hated dragon empire and we could say instead of tyrannical rulership we just say tyranny cut that down a little bit you and your trusted companions work together to survive thrive within and thwart to thrive within and thwart the dragon so could you get rid of survive because survival alone could just be like i hide in a cave and i eat my mushrooms and i don't ever have anything of value and therefore the dragon empire never screws with me
And that doesn't lead itself to adventure. So I think there's an idea of like, greed is a fine motivator. Greed and revenge, you know, I think are fine drivers. But you want them to drive, like, what is the thing that's going to drive them into danger? Why would they... Why would they put themselves at risk? And survival is not good enough. So to thrive within and thwart the tyranny.
Is it okay to steal? So the idea of like, hey, we just rip them off. You know, there's a there's a quote, a Neil Stevenson quote that I really love and I use all the time from Snow Crash, which was, you know, if you can find something with enough inertia, all you have to do is skate off the top and you can get anywhere. Right.
That that essentially, if you have an empire that is so huge with so much riches and so much power, all you have to do is skim point one percent and you can live like a king for the rest of your life. And I think, you know, that idea of like, how do you skim off the power of nine dragons, I think could be really interesting. So I think greed is a fine motivator, along with thwart.
Extreme realist says to thrive within or thwart. I kind of like both, right? I kind of like that you can both thrive within and thwart. But I'm not sure thriving within is right, because I want it to be illicit, right? Like, I want the characters, you know, like, stealing from the Dragon Empire is a cool motivator, right?
You and your companions work together to, you know, so thwart the tyranny of the Dragon Empire isn't enough. What's another one for, like, rip off? To rip off and thwart the tyranny of the Dragon Empire. So, because thriving could be you're a suck-ass, right? Right? Yeah, to rob and thwart the tyranny of the Dragon Empire. Right? Subverts pretty good. Influence, I mean, influence, sure. Pillage.
Pillage sounds like you're the bigger group though, right? It's more like, you know, that idea of skimming off the top. To fleece, that's pretty good. I like fleece. Subvert is good. Man, it's like having a live thesaurus here. This is great. And bleed the dragon empire dry. Yeah. Subverting to fleece. How about fleece?
And if we have these, we don't need to say hated because it's clear, you know, you and your trusted companions work together to fleece, subvert and thwart the tyranny of the dragon empire. I like, that's pretty good. I think we're going to, we're going to stick with that for now. I think, you know, if we, if we, you know, that feels fun, right? I think like the players would get that.
You know, the idea that you're the dirty, rotten scoundrels of the dragon empire, I think is a fun hook. I think that's a good, that's a good character hook. Right. And the campaign hook, and we could take that just the, you know, fleece subvert and, and, and thwart the drag, the tyranny of the dragon empire, I think is a good, you know, I think that's a good campaign hook. I like that.
So I think we need, if we go back to our return here, let's talk about what else we need here. So we have our campaign hook. Now the six truths. So we're gonna define our six truths for this. And so we have our six truths of the Dragon Empire. And so let's see, let's go to our book here, boop. And I think this is pretty straightforward. I don't think I'm going to have too much trouble.
Nine dragons rule the empire. I'm not going to write all of this out right now, but I'm going to get the truths, and then I can fill them out. But essentially, truth one is nine dragons rule the empire. A single sultan rules as their puppet. War is a constant. War is a constant enterprise. The empire is huge, almost too huge. Four, the nine dragons rule the empire.
A single sultan rules as their puppet. War is a constant enterprise. The empire is huge, almost too huge. That's a big one in like, hey, we're going to steal from them. The empire is surrounded by several hated foes. Lots of groups hate the empire. Those aren't bad. Again, I'll probably take some time and fill out the specifics on those with one or two sentences. I'm not sure.
There's several hated foes. There's another part of this, which is the Empire rules under a strict caste system. And you're the bottom rung. I kind of like that. Like, you know, you're the lowest of the group. They have a name for them. I don't, you know, it's a little uncomfortable because it's sort of like a, it's not racial exactly. It's a little racial.
Which is like anybody who's not scaled has a name. And that name are jackals. But they have a jababa? Jabubu? What do they call them? Jambuka. Known as jackals. And it's any non-scaled folk are known as jambuka.
yes and it's correct if you have scaled skin you're actually not on the bottom rung so we have two character races that could still be within that group but that's okay they'd still be on the lower they'd be the lower two rungs so nine dragons rule the empire a single sultan rules as their puppet the empire rules under a strict caste system and you're on the bottom rung war is a constant enterprise the empire is huge almost too huge and the treasuries of the empire are vast
So that's my six. I think that's pretty good. I'll flip by so you can see them here. And when I, as I, as I get my stuff together, I will certainly add more information to this. Like I I'll fill out, you know, a couple of sentences each so that my one page guide, are there any, so I say six truths. It doesn't have to be six. And are any of these redundant or not as fun for the campaign?
So nine dragons rule the empire is important. The single Sultan rules as their puppet is important. The empire rules under sarcastic system is important. War is a constant enterprise is important. The empire is huge, too huge, probably not that important. And instead we can, the nine dragons rule the vast empire. So now we have five instead of six. Fewer is better.
If I get down to four, that'd be great too. But I think the treasuries of the empire vast is important. War is a constant enterprise is important. The caste system is important. The single Sultan is their puppet. I think it's important. So I think all of these five are really, I don't think I can cut any of these without cutting important information about, about the empire.
So I think that those, I think that those are good. So now I got my campaign hook. I got my six trues and now we have fronts and So I don't think I'm going to worry about fronts right now. And you don't really need to have your fronts already established. Not initially. Although I think... So I have some early fronts.
And I think we want to have like a regional, I still like the regional manager at Babbage's. Oh yeah, that's another good question. Scipio brings up group patrons. Like who will the patrons be? And the starting location. I want to add that in here. So I think, let's see. Whoops. We don't need to necessarily have three fronts, but we have the regional manager. I don't know who that is yet.
We'll figure that out. We'll add this stuff. Are there any other? So there's a there's a really interesting one that was in the book that I think I want to throw in here because they're really kind of scary and sort of separate from the empire, but kind of gets into the hey, you know, somebody else here. And if we if we go down, it's actually in a different whole region. The ghost folk.
The idea that there's this ghost folk, which are like these mutated humanoids who live underneath the surface. They live under the White Mountains, which is too far. But I'm going to have them under the Dragon Coil Mountains as well, and that they sort of live underground. And they're the embodiment of the White Goddess.
So, and the ghost folk are these like, you know, and then I'm pulling this and I wouldn't be surprised if this came right out of bone Tomahawk bone Tomahawk gets used all the time. So we'll have not the ghost King, right? Cause we don't want it to be like the one ruler of all of the ghost folk, the ghost Lord, the ghost Lord, who is the regional leader of the ghost folk. I like that group.
So we have the Dragon Empire regional manager. What would be another front that takes place? So there's lots of options for like Jyn and other sort of mystical creatures in the area. We could have the Dustwalker, a chaotic force in the dry lands who could be sort of a Jyn I think would be fun. Jyns are good villains.
especially in stuff like this because they their their level is correct so i think that could be neat now group patrons so who do the character who could the characters potentially work for and i like the idea of throwing like three different patrons in front of the characters and asking them who they who they follow So we could have the chaotic good elder, the local elder.
We could have the neutral good religious leader and the chaotic neutral rogue leader. So the local elder is there for the people. Hey, we want to try to save the people as much as possible. The religious leader wants to break the divinity of the dragon empire. And the rogue leader wants to steal as much as possible without getting burned to death. Those seem like good group patrons.
And the religious leader could be like following a, you know, maybe one of the southern gods. Maybe wants to follow one of the southern gods and recognizes the sacrilege and the heresy of what's going on here is destroying this entire land and needs to be stopped. So I think those could be some fun. Now, starting locations. And we're actually going to have starting location.
And I think we're going to call it the four... The four or 40 fingers. And my idea for this is, and I was thinking about this while I was putting myself to sleep last night. One of the things I do to help put myself to sleep is think about my D and D games. And let's see, is there a knack crash? Who is knack crash? Knack crash is only ever mentioned in this one place. 40 fingered knack crash.
Where did that name come from? So I'm going to do some deep research using my RGA search, my RGA desktop search. want to see some fancy and everyone's going to go oh my god how do i do that let's see Nakrash search. This is using a command line tool called, Hey, look, we found him. Ooh, demon cults and secret societies. Ooh, yay. Hand of Nakrash. So this is RGA search is a complicated tool.
You can go find it on GitHub. It is a command line tool that lets you do searching of PDFs and stuff like that. And I have some scripts, but that's interesting because it's barely mentioned in the Midgard world book, right? It's only mentioned one time. but the Southlands world book has it and demon cults and secret societies has it.
And there's a hand of knack crash document, a demon God of wizards and thieves. And there's an elder glare as well. Okay. So let's go back to our world book here. And we are, let's see. Learn a little bit more about Knack Crash. RPGs. 5e. Kobold Press. And we will, you know, we're going to go with Demon Cults and Secret Societies because that's a cool-ass book. The Hand of Knack Crash. Page 83.
The Hand of Knack Crash. Forty Finger Knack Crash is a simian demon god of wizards and thieves. His eight hands grasp all there is to take and hold. It is said he reserves his lowest left hand for the boldest and most daring of his thefts. And this cult, a pentarctical assemblage of the region's most infamous scoundrels and their followers, revere their god by emulating this behavior.
Five crime lords plot the most audacious and spectacular thefts in order to appease their deity and outdo the other members of their organization. That's kind of interesting, right? There's a big angle on this one. Lord Vermin. Master Kiprek. That's cool. Knowles. Colt has this home in Nuria Natal, their main temple hidden within the sprawl of the capital. So they're far off to the west.
But I think the, so I think that that could be cool because we got like thieves. So we could have them as a front, actually. The Hand of Nekresh. Whoops. So in the front, I have the Ghost Lord, the Dust Walker. We'll add a fourth front. That's how it's spelled. N-A-K-R-E-S-H, yeah. The Hand of Nakrash is a front, right? And we can pick a specific guy as the front.
And I kind of dig this Lord Vermin is great. What is Lord Vermin? He's a monstrosity. Four foot tall, skin and carapace are an oily tan, glittering black eyes sit beneath, look like an insect guy. He's a roachling. That's cool. Master Kiprak could be a fun, would he be the rogue leader? Yeah, I don't know. I kind of like him because he's a kobold. He's like an interesting kobold with a staff.
I kind of like him. I kind of like him as the local elder. So I think I might steal him from there. I love that Lord Vermin is kind of against him. But it could be that like the hand of Nakrash is a front, but also you might work for them a little bit. So that could be kind of neat. Anyway, so the starting location is the 40 fingers of Nakrash. Oh, the four of 40 fingers.
And it is a four large stone, what are they called? Pillars, natural pillars on a rocky slope that breaks the heat during the day and the cold winds at night. It's a small tent town with perhaps 40 people, about 20 of which are local residents. It surrounds a well, a large, deep well with the only natural water for 20, 25 miles in any direction. Say for 50 miles, how many hexes out?
Three hexes out will be 75 miles. 100 miles in any direction. It's also the most common stopping point from the west, from the western cities to the nearby cities of the Dragon Empire. So, oops, I just broke a thing. An example is we're going to look at the map. So I prepped some maps yesterday.
There's a really, really cool tool on that Kobold Press hosts where you can get a map of Midgard and kind of zoom in and stuff like that. And I made a couple of maps. And here is my Dragon Coil hex map. This is a section of what they call the Maharadi Empire, which is the Dragon Empire. And Hakresh is like a major capital. And there's a few other cities.
There's also a, actually, let me pull up the bigger map. So this is the Maharadi Empire, right? Everything in orange is their empire, and it's huge. And scale-wise, this is like, I don't know, 5,000 miles across or something. It's really, really far, you know, 2,500 miles across. Very, very big.
And the area that I want, all of these little breakout regions are the regions of the different dragon Lords. So like there's a different dragon Lord who operates in the dragon scale mountains and the one in our crash, then in some of these other ones. And we have these like Gizmiri is one area. But tech is another area. Mazar is another area.
So I kind of like this idea that it sort of sits between these areas. And I think that, I'm going to drop it right between Gizmiri and Mazar and Batek, right on the edge. So that junction point, that orange junction point. And what's also cool is that apparently is sitting upon a ley line as well. So we have that.
So it could be this like very small encampment that just happens to be in a really important area. So if we look at our hex map of that area, let's see if I can find the right spot. Right south of Ash, Ashadar. Yeah. So I think, and every hex is 24 miles. So we could have it like, you know, right at that, like the edge of that mountain. Yeah. Right there.
This, this hex right in the center of that area, I think is where we're going to drop it. And that way it's sitting upon a ley line. I think that's pretty much exactly where I had it. Yeah. A little bit north of there. So yeah, right up against those mountains.
And the idea that it's sort of like against a mountain range, but up against a dead, a bad land, there really isn't any fresh water anywhere else. And you could see that about three hexes out. It's, you know, it's more than three hexes out from any other known location. And you could say like, it is the only well in that area. You have to travel by it to get to any of these other spots.
You know, I think that works. And it's called the four or 40 fingers because it's four spires sticking out of the ground out of a bunch of spires in the whole area in this mountainous region. And they're known as the 40 fingers of Nekresh. And the adventure is the well has gone sour and the characters need to find out why.
So I think that that would be a fun, I think that that's a fun starter city. So I have dived deep into this in this session. I'm not done yet. I still have more work to do to kind of get my campaign situated. I want to fill out more details. I want to put together that one page guide. I want to, you know, kind of add more details to this.
But I feel like I've got a pretty good outline about where this is going to go. And I have my starting area. I want to fill out that more too, like what are the people there? What kind of, what are the other amenities that the 4 of 40 Fingers has? I like the name, 4 of 40 Fingers is just fun to say, 4 of 40 Fingers.
And, you know, so they have like, you know, the watering hole, obviously, they have like a little, you know, they're equivalent of a outdoor eatery, There are smithies and people who will help you with your pack animals to get around the area. And it probably has a mercenary group that hangs out there too. Maybe the rogue leader is the head of the mercenary gang.
So our rogue leader could be a mercenary. So you have a religious leader, a local elder, who could be Master Kiprak, who could actually be a follower of Forty Fingers of Nakresh. That could be kind of fun. Maybe he isn't chaotic good after all. Maybe he's chaotic neutral. I don't know. We'll see.
I might change my mind on that and have the local leader be a religious leader tied to whatever religion one of the characters is. So that way it's a little tied together. So I could also fill this out as we go with the characters. But I think I've got a fair bit of material now that I just need to fill out more. And hopefully, if I get the opportunity, we will fill it out more on this show.
If not, I can fill it out on my own and I'll show it to you after we start to do a prep for our game, which we still will do. Because when we're done with the... With our Shadow Dark game, I'm going to be diving into this more. So this gives me a good framework to build the rest of my first session and my Session Zero game. Friends, I hope you enjoyed our show today.
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