The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Dragon Empire Campaign Building Part 2 – Lazy GM Prep
Fri, 04 Oct 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. Here with another episode of Sly Flourish's Lazy GM Prep. In this weekly show, I typically go through steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master while preparing for my Sunday role-playing game.
I am not having a game today, so we are going to dive back into my campaign planning for my Tales of the Valiant game set in the Dragon Empire of Midgard, which is where we're going next after we finish our Shadow Dark Gloaming campaign. So we're going to dive into that.
We already have, there's one previous session, one previous episode where I've started my campaign planning around the Dragon Empire. So we're going to refresh ourselves on that and then we're going to flesh it out a bit more with the time that we have now. This show, like all of the work of Sly Flourish, is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish.
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And if you wish to be a patron, there is a link down in the show notes. It's a fantastic deal. You get lots of really great stuff. Please, I hope you will check it out. So last time we began our campaign planning for the Dragon Empire set in the world of Midgard. So this is from the Midgard World Book.
And the Dragon Empire is a huge, known as the Maharadi Empire, is a huge nation on the eastern side of Midgard ruled over by, I think it was nine dragons? Nine?
Nine dragons who have made a pact to not fight each other and not fight over their different bouts of territory and instead create an empire that protects them and their wealth and everything else by electing a high sultan, a single sultan to rule over all of the lands, a humanoid who will rule over all of the empire on their behalf.
So that way they don't have to be involved in the daily politics of what's going on in this giant empire, super giant empire, super rich empire, but they don't have to manage it themselves. And instead they have this one central point, this grand, what do they call it, dread sultan? I think now it's a dread sultan. I don't know if it's always referred to as a dread sultan.
But this one sultan who commands over the entire empire and rules on their behalf, knowing that they are actually under the thumb of these great dragons. And we decided in our last prep session, we kind of said, okay, what do we want the characters to be and to be doing in this? And we liked the idea. Let's see. I'll pop over to my obsidian notes here.
So we decided, let's look at our campaign notes. So, we had a small band of heroes in the outer fringes of the greatest empire on Midgard begins their journey to fleece, subvert, and thwart the tyranny of the Maharati dragon empire. We really like this idea. I really kind of dug this idea of that, you know, it's sort of like a Ocean's Eleven in the richest empire that's going on.
We came up with our truths. So I put all of this stuff together. And then after the show, I put it together a one-page campaign guide for my players. And this is the current one-page campaign guide here.
where i took all that material that we kind of put together and put it together into a nice nicely formatted one-page guide that i can send to my players probably a few days before we get together i don't want to here's a here's a trick if i send this to them too early they will abandon the current campaign and they will already start building characters around this one without talking to one another and i really don't want them to do that i want us to build our characters together to
during the session so that they will be riffing off one another before we do it and that can be messy it's kind of messy to build characters at the table together there's a lot of like well what do you want to build i don't know what are you going to build well i was thinking about a monk well but i don't have to do if you don't want to and you're like you know what that kind of mess is okay because at least they're talking about what other characters they're going to come with so a lot of times what i'll say is like you don't have to come with a character concept you can come up with a character concept at the session zero
If, however, you do, please come with at least two and don't be wedded to either of them. And that way, when they show up, they might have two different characters that they go, oh, I can either play this cleric or I can play this monk. And they go, oh, well, I was going to play. OK, fine, I'll play the monk. Right.
And that way you can you can do a little bit of that and that there isn't like, oh, I have my heart set on this one character who was already built out and has all background story. And you're like that background story doesn't fit this campaign at all. I'm sorry.
so you don't want to give too much information too early where they start to build the whole story in their head and then they're not ready when you actually want to you know come together with everybody else so let's take a look at our one page notes here because i think this will kind of baseline everything about what we are doing for the rest of our prep because this kind of one page guide also helps me decide what kind of adventures we're going to run where the game is going to start what kind of situation is going on that can that can begin the campaign
So the Scourge of the Dragon Empire is the name of this campaign. A small band of heroes in the outer fringes of the greatest empire of Midgard begins their journey to fleece, subvert, and thwart the tyranny of the Maharati Dragon Empire. So we have some cool stuff. We have some proper names like the Maharati Dragon Empire.
We know the goal is for the characters to fleece, subvert, and thwart the tyranny of this empire. They are not fighting on behalf of the empire. The empire is bad, right? We're not going to have any Star Wars characters who are working on the side of the empire. So we've clarified that in a single sentence right at the beginning.
Scourge of the Dragon Empire is a Tales of the Valiant campaign set in the Maharati Empire in the east of Midgard. This guide gives you a taste of the adventures to come and a guide for building your hero in these vast lands. That's what we're trying to do. Focus the heroes. A lot of times GMs sort of give free reign to their players to build characters. And then I think you're kind of
Right off the bat, you're in a mess where why are these guys even together? What are they doing? Are their motivations aligned at all? And then you have to kind of make it work after the fact. And by the time they've built, by the time your players have built characters, they're already invested. And if they built a character that are invested in an area that does not focus them at all.
then it becomes a real problem to try to get them in there. And I've seen it where I've had like players showed up with a character and like, well, I don't really care about this. Why would my character do it? And I'm like, okay, your character wanders off, make a new character. And they're like, well, wait, what?
And you were like, you know, your job as a player is to build a character that, and come up with a reason why your character wants to go on these adventures. I don't have to come up with that, but it helps to have that focus. And that's one of the purposes of a guide like this is to be like, that's the star you're aiming for. All of you are aiming that way.
It could be anything you want, but you're going that way because that works out. So then we have the truths of the Maharadi empire. I went around and around with this and ended up with four, which I think is a good number of them. Those who reside within the Dragon Empire live knowing the following truths, lest they become bones bleached under the red sun. That's fun. A little bit of flavor there.
Nine dragons rule the Maharati Empire. 400 years ago, the ancient red dragon Maharat created a pact among neighboring dragons, an alliance forging the Maharati Empire. Today, nine dragon lords rule over the empire, stretching thousands of miles. The dragon lords remain mostly in seclusion, leaving the sultan to manage the empire as their titanic treasures grow ever more vast.
I think I took that right out of the book. A single sultan rules as their puppet. The dragon lords stay out of the day-to-day activities, leaving a single sultan or sultana in charge. The current dragon-born dread sultan, Azmir al-Sragul, deposed his predecessor, the human sultana, Kazmara Azbahir, who fled for her life and is rumored to be hiding in the western seven cities.
I could probably... What I'm going to do while we're talking is I'm going to edit this a little bit. This is a great time for me to... tweak this while we go. So I'm going to pull up my, let's see campaign materials. And this is my dragon empire. And I can pull up my notes because anything I can do to trim this down a little bit, I would love to do. I'd love to remove as many words as possible.
So the fact that, that, that,
the sultana is rumored to be hiding in the western seven cities is not relevant now that might be something they learn later i'm not going to be editing the one that you guys are seeing i'm editing a word document is on the side so that will still help dragon the dragon rulers pay little attention to this change in leadership that do i need that i think i could cut that out too
Because that could be a question that the characters have that they bring with them. Do the dragon empire care? And then people are like, we don't know. Who the hell knows what's in their minds? The nine Morza, the great dragon lords, reside at the top of a strict caste system.
The Ermolani, the roughly 500 scaled lords, rule over cities, command armies, hold ancient strongholds, or reside over temples to the great dragon gods. The Timarli include minor nobles, generals, mayors, ambassadors, priests, and landowners. Need an and in there. 48 million scaled Akinji, Ejet, Sekbans, and Kobaldi formed the lower ranks of the caste.
At the very bottom are the Jambuka, the jackals, 14 million sentient beings of flesh or fur, not scales. And that's you. That might be true. You might actually have a scale form. So I like this one's kind of meaty, but I think it's good that we can start to get some of the lingo. Into the player's heads that they know, everyone knows the caste system that's in the Dragon Empire.
And even having these kind of names, the Ermanali, Ermanli, Ermanli? It's going to be hard for us to pronounce these. Tamarli, Akinji, Edgits, Sekbens. Like we get these in our heads and that way it becomes part of the lore. So using proper names and proper nouns for stuff helps, I think. We can say occasional hideous losses.
The empire stretched its borders far enough that they must defend enormous provinces from Nur-i-Natal and Qadariya and a handful of smaller kingdoms that banded together to face the Maharadi. Yet the dragon lord's fire and claws remain as sharp as ever. The dragon lord's claws. We don't need dragon lord's fire because fire doesn't remain sharp. Yet the dragon lord's claws remain as sharp as ever.
So that's that's the setting like that's all we need to give the players to be like, oh, OK, I get what's going on here. Right. And there's a touch more that we give them about like where they're starting. But most of that gets into character creation. But I think that's pretty solid like that. It's meaty and not too much. Right. You don't want to give three pages of backstory.
You may want to, but they're not going to read it. So one page, you'd be lucky they read one page. Your character in the Empire. Your character begins at the Four of Forty Fingers well station in the southern reaches of the Maharadi Empire between the Dragonlord regions of Batek, Mazir, and Gizmiri. They don't know anything about what that means, but we'll have a map.
You may be, and then this is where you get into like, who are you? You may be a hired caravan guard, a mercenary between jobs, a shady scoundrel in hiding, or a protector of the people caught under the claws of the empire. Your motivations might include greed. One can get filthy rich skimming off the top of the greatest hordes of the dragon lords.
Revenge, the vast machine of the dragon lords cost you your whole life. It's time they paid it back. Justice, for too long, people of the empire suffered under the tyranny of the dragon lords. Peace, so many tens of thousands died under the scourge of the Thimilari war masters. It must end. So right up front, we're talking about this. And I was talking with Michelle today about this.
And one of the interesting things is about alignments. You can almost remove the lawful and evil alignments from these character types. And that means you have only basically four alignments left. I don't even know if there are alignments in Tales of the Valiant. I'm not sure. But essentially, you can be neutral or chaotic. You can be neutral, chaotic, or good, right?
And any sort of combination of those. But you cannot be lawful good because the law here is not good. The rules of the Maharati Empire are brutal and they destroy those that they don't protect, which is based on that caste system. It is an inherently evil law that rules over the Maharati Empire. So that means you cannot be lawful good.
And then if you're lawful neutral or lawful evil, you're really kind of supporting the evil of the empire, which means that that character is not going to really work well in this campaign. And likewise, I don't want evil characters. Because evil characters don't care about the people either at all. And, you know, I don't want to run an evil campaign.
Now, you can be chaotic neutral and be out for yourself, right? That's different. And if you're out for revenge, you could be chaotic good. As in, like, I'm out for justice and peace, our good chaotic good. And we could even put, maybe what we'll do is put some alignment. Well, let's take a look just for fun. If there is any alignment there.
there doesn't appear to be kind of any alignment so alignment never comes up if we look at character creation here do they have a replacement for that so this is the tales of valiant players guide i've got over here on the left and we're kind of skimming through because i'm new to it too right i've never done it so we have creating and leveling milestones prerequisites experience points we have classes we have lineage and heritage we have backgrounds and talents and
And then we have equipment and magic items. So I don't think that they have any alignment replacement. I don't think that there is anything like alignment, which probably means I don't need to even worry about mentioning alignment when we talk about it. I was going to put alignments next to these four different things here. But I think they stand on their own.
And if we're playing a system that doesn't have alignment, then we don't need to worry about it. We're going to skip it and instead go with these motivations. So I think that those are good, solid motivations. I think there's a lot of room in there too, right? Yeah. And, you know, the one thing I'll say is like, you know, whatever you choose. So I guess I don't really have that in here. Right.
Like, so I mean, I am missing one line in here that I want to put in. So this is I'm glad I'm glad we're checking, which is like the the one thing how, you know, wherever you came from. And however, and wherever you came from and whatever your motivation, you band with your fellow heroes to thwart, fleece, what did I say? And subvert. To fleece, subvert, and thwart. Thwart, fleece, and subvert.
I like that. The corruption of the dragon empire. Wherever you came from and whatever your motivation, you band with your fellow adventurers to thwart, fleece, and subvert the corruption of the Dragon Empire. So I think that's good. You're not fighting against your fellow characters. It's not necessary that you are a hero who wants to save people.
It's okay to do this out of personal greed, I think. Personal greed is okay, as long as you're not hurting people to do it. Probably worth a conversation. So I like to thwart. I'm changing the original thing. Instead of the corruption, the dragon power would say tyranny. Tyranny of the Dragon.
You came from, and whatever your motivation, you band with your fellow adventurers to thwart, fleece, and subvert. We could just say whatever your backgrounds. Whatever your background and motivation, you band with your fellow adventurers to thwart, fleece, and subvert at the tyranny of the Dragon Empire. So that's important.
That way you're saying, like, I don't care anything else about your character. You're doing this. You're working with your fellow. That's your reason to adventure is wired right into the place. So that works. Character creation, very simple. Like character creation is very straightforward. Characters begin at first level using the Tales of the Valiant Adventurer's Guide. Bang.
I think it's Player's Guide. I think I messed that up, right? I think it's called the Player's Guide. It is called the Player's Guide. So not Adventurer's Guide. Characters begin at first level using the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide with the standard ability scores 16, 14, 14, 13, 10, and 8. I think I don't have a problem. Like, I don't think, let's see, let's go to our ability.
I really like that speed of picking that. But let's take a look. Like, do I really care if they do point by? Because they may want to. They're nerds. And do I want to get in the way of that? So they can either do either with point by or the standard array, right? I'm not going to get in the way with either point by or the standard array. I'm going to capitalize that.
I'm not going to capitalize it. The standard array of 16, 14, 14, 13, 10, and 8. The interesting thing about the character creation, so the interesting thing about those ability scores, there's no way to start with a 17, which means at fourth level when you get a new talent, your plus one bonus is either going to be wasted on trying to get your 16 to a 17, which I'm okay with, I think.
And that means at level eight, you're going to get another talent and finally an 18, or you're going to boost your 13 to a 14, but then you have three 14s and who the hell needs three 14s. So we'll see what people do with that. And I don't, but I don't think that there's a good way.
You have to lower your score so much in order to get a 17 so that you can get an 18 by the time you hit that you get an 18 by the time you hit fourth level. Pause for a minute. During this campaign, at any time, anyone can say pause for a minute to stop the current conversation. So this is where we get into safety tools, right? We have two sections of safety tools that I put in all my games.
And even though I've been playing with these players forever, I still like to go over it and make sure everybody's clear. So that all works. So I have two types of safety tools that I like to wire into my one-page guide. I've been using this now for a few years, right? And I have two. First one is pause for a minute.
During the campaign, at any time, anyone can say pause for a minute to stop current conversations and break character to discuss any issues. Use it freely to clarify the game's direction and address any concerns.
So one of the things that I think is important for pause for a minute is you don't have to just use it for extreme things like I really don't want us to do this thing that we're going to do that makes me uncomfortable as a player. It can also be pause for a minute. What exactly is our motivation to go into this place? Why are we here again?
And someone says, we're here to steal the treasure because the guy told you, oh, that's right. The game on. Right. So pause for a minute can be used just for out of game clarification of anything, but it can also be used as a safety tool. So that way we normalize its use so that it isn't too weird.
We I had somebody use it that I've been playing with for years and they used it and said one player was doing one thing. That was kind of like a goofy, funny thing, but kind of, you know, gross. And then somebody else said, pause for a minute. Can we just not do that? And the guy said, yeah, sure. And then we moved on. Right. And there it worked.
And so that it was, it can work very well as a safety tool, but it also can work to pause for a minute. I've had people do this too, or I will use it as a GM. Here's another trick. The other trick with pause for a minute is you should use it a lot.
So anytime you can see like a conflict going between players and you're not sure, you're not a hundred percent sure if it's a player conflict or a character conflict, but
you can say pause for a minute as players how do you feel about this and they may go oh as a player i'm totally good with it and you go okay and it's just character that yeah okay game on right and then they go back and then they can argue as characters but that way even because they it can bleed over right when you're role playing a character your emotions as that character can bleed over into your real life emotions and this is a way to just say hey let's just make sure those two things are separate so that your character can be really upset about something you don't so pause for a minute very very valuable
Content lines and veils. I like to outline my own. What are my lines and veils that I want to have in my game? And then what might this campaign have that we need to keep in mind? And this was true with Empire of the Ghouls. It was true with like Rime of the Frostmaiden, where there are some areas where you're like, hey, we got to, you know, these are themes of the campaign.
We all want to talk about how to handle some of that stuff. And so I said, this campaign includes racism and classism by evil NPCs. Good aligned characters, including your own PCs, do not hold these racist ideals. So we're going to say good and neutral. Or I think because we don't have alignment. So I say our heroes, the characters. Well, what are we going to say? I guess we're okay with that.
Good and neutral aligned characters, including your own PCs, do not hold these racist ideals. So I don't want racist characters, right? I don't want characters who are like, oh, I hate furry people, right? No, we're not going to have any of that in there.
So you guys are cool, but recognizing that the dragon empire, as you can see from the strict caste system that exists, the scaled folks think that the non-scaled folks are jackals. That's kind of a theme to it, but I don't want that to bleed into the character. So we have to kind of make sure like that's, that's the, the, the line is right.
That you will, the, the campaigns likely to include this and I'm not going to like overdo it, but you know, there's going to be racism and classism by evil NPCs in this group. And that's what you're fighting against. Extreme violence, slavery, torture, and consensual sexual contact would be veiled off screen. So that's veiled, right?
This campaign will not include, these are the lines, non-consensual sexual contact or harassment, PC-initiated torture, character-driven racism. I should change this to PC because I think they use the term PC throughout. PC is used throughout Tales of the Valiant. They stuck with PC where like 5th edition, original style was always character.
Campaign will not include non-consensual sexual contact harassment, PC-initiated torture, PC-driven racism, violence towards domesticated animals, violence towards children, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, death by exposure on the sea, or non-consensual PC on PC violence, theft, or betrayal. You'll note that like one of those is different than the others, right?
The death by exposure on the sea. I had a player who said, hey, I have a thing about that. Can we not do that? I said, yes, bang. So it's already in there because we already know that we don't want that. And things like violence towards domesticated animals came up in a game and it was very upsetting. And so we got rid of it and I don't need it. So it's gone.
So those are, and we can even say this, lines. I think we will put it in order. So we have lines. So I think that makes it pretty clear. And that's the touchy subject of racism and classism. You know, it's part of the campaign. I feel like our players are mature enough to handle this. But I think like during the session zero, I have to say like, this is in here.
Let's make sure we're on the right side of that. Yeah. Let's make sure we're on the good side of this. So now I've stuck my one pager here in the notes. So what else? Okay, so I've talked through the whole one pager, which is great. And then the next question is, what is the first session gonna be like?
So what I'm going to do, what I wanna do is come up with a new note here, and we're gonna call this our session zero checklist. So these are the things that I need to do when we're running our session. So this is sort of like my, you know, it's not quite the eight steps. It might be. We might come up with that.
And when I do so, though, I'll do that on the day where we're actually doing it, we're coming up with the session itself. But I want to have some idea of like, what are the things that we need to do? So some of the things that they need to do are give access to Tales of the Valiant material ahead of time. And so there's a few different ways I can do it.
The Google Drive view of the Player's Guide PDF. The link to the Black Flag PDF. An account. Accounts and access to the TOV Player's Guide to Tales of the Valiant through Shard PDF. Right. I have I have access through shard. So I need to when I send them an email, I'm going to send them an email with all of this stuff in it. So this is really before the before the session, not a bullet.
Send out the one pager during the session. So go over the one pager, build characters together, probably describe... Well, let's see, we probably want our strong start, right? In the four or 40 fingers. Describe the four or 40 fingers and then our first adventure. Is there anything else that we need to do during the session zero? We can take a look at return. And we have a thing about running.
We have a chapter on this. So running a session zero. So describe the world. Not a typical gaming session. Describing the world in the campaign book. A hook that is really from that guide. Managing expectations. We talked about that. Tying the characters together. So we can put that in our list if we want. And we have, so we have factions, right?
So tying the characters to factions or NPC together to tie the tie. Well, we'll want to describe our factions. So we need to know some of those initial factions. I think we had some ideas for that. Then our guide for characters towards cooperative adventure is in our session guide as well. So we have a few things that we want to do there. So then let's talk about our factions.
I had an idea about this too. I had an idea about the factions. So here's my campaign notes. So we have some fronts, but I haven't, oh, so here are the group patrons, right? We have, and look, I put alignments next to them, but we probably don't need to have alignments. The local elder slash rebel leader is Master Kiprak. Oh, then we have two others.
So one of the fun things I was considering is that one of the factions that operates out of the 440 Fingers is the actual Hand of Nakresh, which is a cult from Demon Cults and Secret Societies. Let's take a look. So this is Demon Cults and Secret Society's fantastic book by Kobol Press. I really love it. I've used it a lot. And because you can imagine it is about cults.
And Hand of Nakresh is one of the cults. Now, what's interesting is I really feel like the Hand of Nakresh who are all like thieves actually can be a good character faction instead of being evil doers.
Now, the neat thing is that there are five, there are five Lords of Nakrash and they could be, you know, so we could have some inner, there could be inner struggles among the leaders of Nakrash, which I kind of, which I kind of dig. And I think I picked you up. Master Capric is,
is one of them we have lord vermin so we might pick like a couple of them like maybe they're they're kind of against each other it could be kind of fun kiprek is unassuming for scaly form ashen emaciated thin wrapped in uh well tailored but stained robes of an academic cobalt a great intellect and rather high ethical standards within his alchemical profession he's an alchemist that's handy however outside of that work however he's completely immoral and unscrupulous i think we're going to change that you
His outrageous acts of larceny, which funded his research, attract the attentions of the hand of Nakresh. Master Kiprak is the only member of the five to have been brought into their ranks from outside the brotherhood of the cult.
For his part, Master Kiprak is happy to play the cult's rules, and he finds the challenge of octennial contests stimulating and fine venue in which to test new alchemical experiments or apparatuses. most is the most open of the five, accepting anyone of the proper intelligence, devotion, and criminal demeanor into the ranks of his followers, except for the loathsome gnomes.
See, they get racism right there. After all, he does maintain some standards. That's kind of funny, but we're going to cut that part too. So I think it could be fun. I think one way we're going to kind of modify the hand of Nakrash is that there is some inner struggle among this group. So even though we're going to have the hand of Nakrash be like a character faction and
And I like the idea that Master Kiprak is sort of the local elder at the Four Forty Fingers. And the other, you know, probably his role as one of the Five Fingers of Nakresh, one of the members of the Hand of Nakresh, is somewhat secret. And there could be other Nakresh groups operating in here that they struggle with. So I think that that one's good.
We also want to have a religious leader whose goal, so save, so I think like Master Kiprak, his goal is actually not to save as much as possible, as an extend, steal as much as possible from the dragon empire without, right? That he's really the thief and maybe do some good in the process. So then do we really need the rogue leader mercenary leader? Or do we need another?
I mean, maybe we flip this a little bit. So Master Kiprek could be the local elder rogue leader. And then we have sort of a freedom fighter, right? And the freedom fighter wants to free, to shatter the structure of the empire and save the hundreds of thousands of people.
doomed to death in the dragon's infernal wars and then we have the religious leaders break the divinity of the dragon empire so we can't just go to our random generator here i don't know that i have like npcs on hand i don't think we're going to drop a turtle folk in there zoe doom singer a pious kobold what if it's a kobold oh then we have two kobolds because master kiprek is a kobold so we don't want to have two wow look at all the turtle folks
We could even be a goblin, pious goblin. So that's not bad. And then the freedom fighter could be a firbolg. Do they have, let's look at the, what are the core races of Tales of the Valiant here? So our core species, or what are we calling them here? Heritage? Lineage. Beastkin. Dwarf, elf, human, kobold, orc, small folks. I think we'll probably do a beastkin.
And the beastkin can be multiple types, right? The sturdy beastkin. And I think it'll be like a, it could be a gnoll, right? So we don't have like, we don't have gnoll. Gnolls are, they're not in this list, but the gnolls are a common group that operates in here. So the freedom fighter could be a gnoll. Thora, worm seeker. If they were called worm hunted, they'd probably be killed. Gnoll hunter.
Throw our worm bait because their speakings are going to eventually get them. So I think that that could be great. So somebody, let's see, Damien asks, so which God does a religious leader adhere to? We're going to see what gods the characters adhere to. And funny enough, I think Zoe Doomsinger will be worshiping that same God. Skate where the puck is going to be.
So I think that that can work out. So then we have like three, so we have three group patrons. We have the 440 Fingers location. So we'll have like, what kind of locations do you need in it? So this is like a tent city, right? A small tent town. So they need to have a watering hall. They need to have a, is it really a liverly? Like what's the place where you take care of animals?
We need a, it's not a menagerie, but it'd be like, you know, all the different kinds of pack animals and stuff that you would have. Is that a livery? I don't know how to spell apothecary. Poth. Yeah, it was really close. Okay. So we have a watering hall. We have a livery. We have an apothecary. We have a mercenary company who operates out of here.
We have several dining tents and we'll have to come up with some names for those. Mostly they'll be separated up at like vegetarian. What? Oh, look at that. A carvancery. Thank you, Scipio. That's fantastic. A place where people can rest and sleep. Cool. That's a name. I got to look that up on the internet.
An inn in some eastern country is a large courtyard that provides accommodations for caravans. Perfect. Very cool. Good pickup. A smithy and an armory. So we probably need... So one thing we have to think about is... Because I think we have our factions. But which of the... So we have like the faction tent, right? And we're going to have to fill that out.
But which... We already kind of looked into which regions... Oh, because we looked at it in our one-page guide. So let's have another quick look here. So Batek, Mizar, and Gizmiri are the three locations. And that means we have three dragon lords that operate out of there. So let's take a quick look at which ones. So the region, so we have the names of the dragons are in here somewhere.
So we said it's Gizmiri is Atasha, the lord of the province. Atesh. And who is Atesh? Lives in a holy temple. And super fiery. Gizmiri, the Red Province. The other ones were B'tech and Mazir. Parsis, the Hidden. Golden Wind Dragon. And then the other one was Mazar? Or is Mazar a sub-region of something else? Yeah, Mazar is an area of trade. Oh no, here we go. Iberlan, the Illustrious.
And he's an undead dragon. So there's sort of like a royal tent where ambassadors of the dragon lords of Gizmiri and Batek and Mazar meet. And I think one of the neat things about this will be that because this outpost sort of sits between multiple locations... No one dragon Lord rules over that one spot, right?
That the, that, that multiple, and that is a, that is a fun source of strife, a fun source of, of friction that can, that can occur. And I think our first adventure, somebody reminded me that our first adventure operated exactly the same way in the gloaming game where they found a corrupt well, and they had to go down to the well and figure out what was going on. I like corrupt wells.
I guess it's a good shtick, and we'll see if my players remember. A couple of them are super sharp for that kind of thing, so they might. But the idea that there's some kind of corruption down in the well, and I think that that can connect us to a larger idea, which we're going to dive into, of... Where's the other factions?
the ghost folk right that there's like a there's a there's there's a group of people like troglodyte type people that live under the ground and worship you know the the the white queen or whatever her name is the kind of orc queen and they conduct all kinds of terrible stuff down there. And they're like a major sort of uncontrollable threat.
I think that that could be, I think that that could be a really fun faction that they, they then face and then realize that they've made some kind of the idea of like, Hey, you've got a, a well and there's caves underneath the well. And they go down there and they find out that there's a band of these, of the, of the ghosts, the ghost folk, you know, we'll call them the ghost walkers.
That sounds kind of cool. Now we have dust walkers. So You know, I don't know. We'll come up, come up with another name for him. And they go down there and find out that they have created some kind of sacrilegious altar with all kinds of like dead disease bodies that is, that is infected the nearby waters and cause the waters to go sour.
I think that would be kind of a fun, a fun kind of initial quest. And then we can get into all the rest. So I think we've got, you know, we've gone some steps further. We looked at our, we did a little bit of editing in our one page guide, which I think is great. And I feel like I've got enough now to run the first session or two, right? I think I've got enough to get started with the campaign.
And really like, this is the point where a lot of GMs keep running and they keep building and they keep building storylines and they keep building whole plots and threads and keep going. And there's a point where you just wanna stop and say, hey, I've got enough to run the first session. I don't really need anything more. Now I can let the rest of it kind of happen organically as the characters.
I don't even know who the characters are yet and who the characters are could change a lot of what's going on. So I don't want to, I don't want to presuppose too much, but I think I've got enough to, to, to kind of get started. And there's certainly more I could do.
And there's more that I would want to do when I actually probably will have another episode right before I do my, my, my session zero where we can dive into this more and, and,
name some of these places and stuff like that friends i want to thank all of you for hanging out with me today while we dug into my new campaign i'm really excited for this one i think it's going to be a lot of fun i love every campaign but i like i always like getting excited about new ones if you enjoyed this show and you want to see more stuff like this the best thing you can do is subscribe to the newsletter you get a weekly rpg related email sent to your inbox every week that includes links to all of the work that i do you also get a free adventure generator just for signing up
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