I think I'm going to do each of the five fronts as a separate post, and add to each some background stuff. For today, the background stuff is actually on the Chaos in Waychester campaign brief, but now I have... you probably guessed it; Hero Forge images of all of my potential patrons that the PCs could pick!
Then we'll get started in to the actual front. And yes, I also have new images of the Grand Duke and Duchess too.
Eventually I'll have Hero Forge images of all of the major NPCs, but, we don't need them all now. I'll also bold all of the names so that they're easier to find when needed.
If you recall, this front is about the eponymous chaos in Waychester. The PCs have actually been down in Southumbria, in Dunsbury, Waychester's kinda sorta mirror and rival city-state, but disturbing rumors have reached them that Grand Duke Guilbert de Vandes has imprisoned his wife, the Grand Duchess Josephine in the highest tower of his castle in Waychester, because of witchcraft. But, because he's still so in love with her, or something something blah blah blah, he couldn't put her to death as the law stipulates, so she's imprisoned. The populace of Northumbria and indeed all of the Hill Country is more than scandalized, and in Waychester in particular, civil unrest is a growing problem. The PCs are traveling together to investigate, but they may be going for different reasons, depending on the patron that each individual PC picked (or maybe they all decided to go with one patron. Doesn't matter.)
The four potential patrons are the following:
Lord Anstal Tane: This middle-aged noble is a Northumbrian native, but has been living in exile in Dunsbury for a decade and a half. He was once engaged to the Grand Duchess, before her involvement with the Grand Duke made that impossible, and he had to flee a bad political situation. He is desperate to know what is happening with her and if she is in need of rescue from the Grand Duke or his subjects.
Gnumus Silesus: A representative of a powerful trading syndicate from Lomar in the north that has a great deal of money tied up in Northumbria is concerned about its investment; including bribes to the Grand Duke for prime land on which to build a caravanserai and dock on the Darkling Sea. Rumors are that in the chaos, the Grand Duke may seize all lands not already under the control of his allies. Silesus will pay handsomely to protect the syndicate’s investment.
Sir Liamond Wreldane: The Hill Country Rangers are not loyal to either of the two rival city-states, but rather directly to the people of the Hill Country. Sir Wreldane represents the rare and secretive Shadows, a division of the Rangers who concern themselves with supernatural threats. He has credible reports of suspicious and dangerous activity in Waychester, but contrary to the reports of the Grand Duke, he’s not so sure that the rumors of their nature are true, or if some other source is to blame for the shady goings-on in Waychester.
Lord-Captain Embric Stane: A retired commander of the Lady’s Guard, the Grand Duchess’ personal paramilitary organization, Lord-Captain Stane is still hale enough to wield a sword, and along with some of his other compatriots living quietly in Southumbria is considering a dramatic return to active duty to save Waychester from itself. However, given the rumors and what he knows of both the Grand Duke and his wife, he’s not sure which of the two of them it needs saving from and is hoping your report can convince his forces which way to throw their weight if they decide to enter the fray.
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| Lord Anstal Tane; never a super athletic man, has now become rather portly, but also rather wealthy, even in exile, due to his unflinching business acumen. But he still carries a torch for Josephine, whom he almost married before she caught the eye of the Grand Duke. |
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| Gnumus Silesus is a Hyperborean from Lomar, but he enjoys the culture and climate of the Hill Country, so he makes sure that his business keeps him here. His home is in Dunsbury, but he represents interests across the region. He's a cheerful fellow, yet ruthless in business, and prefers to dress in his own interpretation of Hillmen style. |
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| Sometimes called "the Head Shadow" himself, he is the leader of a division of the Rangers that specializes in hunting ghosts, daemons, witches, and other supernatural threats across the Hill Country. It's all rather off the books, as technically the Rangers don't acknowledge the existence of supernatural threats in public. |
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| A pragmatic and even somewhat cynical man, Lord Captain Embric Stane still knows his duty, even in retirement. He's determined to save Northumbria from itself, regardless of what the actual threat is; the Grand Duchess, or the Grand Duke! |
CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER
From this point on, spoilers will follow. I'm pulling back the curtain on how I run, and how I run is that I know what the Bad Guys are doing, and it takes the PCs to determine how they will interact with the bad guys and their agenda. I've established a framing device, so the PCs don't ignore the intended campaign altogether, but they've got not only a lot of freedom in determining how they go about investigating that premise, but also how to interweave the various other fronts in as well as hooks and clues come up.
So, first spoiler. The Grand Duchess really is a witch. In fact, she's a real beaut; basically a supernatural, life-sucking Elizabeth Bathory type; except instead of just justification for being a psycho serial killer, it actually works. The confinement in the tower isn't what it seems; she actually has sorcerous means of coming and going if she pleases, although she rarely does, because she also has sorcerous means of communicating with her minions without leaving. In reality, the Grand Duke didn't imprison her at all, she entered the tower and fortified it with thaumaturgy against him and his own pet sorcerers. It's her panic room, not her prison, but he's spun the story differently for the people, of course. His advisors also suspect that she may be a lich with a canopic talisman that will bring her back from the dead like Koschei the Deathless.
But the Grand Duke isn't any better. In fact, although he's not really a lich, because he has no sorcerous talents, his own sorcerous advisors have created for him a canopic talisman, so he is also like Koschei the Deathless. Not only that, he wants to militarily conquer Southumbria and turn the entire freedom-loving Hill Country into his own private demesne, the Hill Kingdom with himself as its first reigning king, of course. He's been kidnapping poor or foreign girls for the Grand Duchess's "blood baths" for some time, in fact, he'd started in particular kidnapping Southumbrian girls, in the hope of raising a hue and cry for him to save the Southumbrians from the terror of their missing daughters. That didn't go on for very long, however, before he had to move against his wife, because she was about to move against him.
Both of them have as their primary goal to destroy the other, and end their deathless state, so that they can rule undisputed and unchallenged by the other. The Grand Duke does have a canopic talisman, locked in his own secret chambers, in a place nobody else knows (or so he believes). The Grand Duchess does not have a canopic talisman and is not a lich; she's just maintained her youth via renewal by killing and torturing various young girls, and stealing their vitality. But the Grand Duke doesn't know that, so he's on a quest to find her talisman, which does not exist.
She has discrete agents searching for clues to the whereabouts of the Grand Duke's own talisman, as well as how to get rid of his two sorcerous advisors; one a wizened old warlock of frightful reputation, and the other a vampire from Timischburg. She would have some agents located in Burham's Landing, looking for discrete and capable people that could be talked into trying to do assist in this task, which naturally the PCs will be prime candidates for as they will kind of obligatorily (by means of geography) have to pass through Burham's Landing to get from Dunsbury to Waychester.
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| I had another image for Josephine de Vandes, but I found these images in the Library and I liked them better, after fixing a few things with the colors and proportions. She does look a little bit ethereal and unearthly, but that's probably a result of her not being ale to bathe in the blood of innocent girls for some time. |
Meanwhile, the second row of the x5 is that as the PCs approach Waychester, they will find the countryside in a state of turmoil. The Lady's Guard, her own personal bodyguard and (small) military unit was disbanded and declared outlaw, but their oaths to the Grand Duchess mean that they are living outside of town attempting to find a way to overthrow the regime that has imprisoned their patroness. However, they don't really have a solid plan or the manpower to execute their grander ideas, so they're mostly just accosting travel into and out of the city to the villages and hamlets of the Karst Peninsula. They also have no means of supporting themselves very well except via banditry. This has had little impact on progress towards their goals and has angered the common people who live outside of the city. I suppose it's possible that the PCs may want to help them get their act together and stand against the Grand Duke (especially if they fall really hard for the story that Josephine's agents will tell of his wickedness—which has the added benefit of being true, even though it leaves out the fact that she's every bit his match). Or they may want to stop them from harassing regular people in the countryside. Or they may want to avoid them, but they'll have to deal with them in some way, because the Grand Duke has laid false trails for anyone searching for his canopic talisman that it's hidden in the hut of a witch or warlock deep in the wilderness. It isn't, but there really are witches and warlocks deep in the wilderness, as well as other unsavory things, and the Lady's Guard is on their way to becoming one of the more unsavory things themselves, even if many of them are well-intentioned albeit desperate.
The third row of the x5 is the City Watch, which has become a Stalinesque secret police, as they beat down the doors of anyone they suspect might know anything at all about Josephine's canopic talisman. Because it doesn't exist, they're getting more desperate and more aggressive in their tactics. Many of the Duke's people, including many who run the City Watch, are using the excuse to finger rivals or enemies as having information, even if it's just invented. Many of them simply disappear never to be seen again. In reality, the Duke's vampire runs the City Watch as his own personal military in the Duke's name, and not only do the abuses of the Watchmen themselves need to be stopped because they are throttling the freedom and livelihood (not to mention the actual lives, in some cases) of the citizenry, but the vampire, Lucien Russo, is using the opportunity to take victims. Some of them are now enthralled ghouls or lesser vampires, but most are just vampire food. I'm not sure if he is happy just empire-building as a subordinate to the Grand Duke, or if he hopes to supplant him, but I suppose it doesn't really matter as his problems will come to the fore long before he makes a move on the Grand Duke, if he ever wants to.
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| Guilbert de Vandes, Grand Duke of Northumbria |
That said, as part of this, the PCs (and the Duke's inquisition) will get wind of a carefully planted red herring on learning that the Grand Duchess's personal huntsman left on a ship for Cayminster, and from there by coach to Burlharrow, an isolated town in the far north. In truth, the Huntsman (Morcant Gunderic) doesn't know anything about any talisman of the Duchess's, because he believes that she doesn't have one, but he does know that the Duke's castle is riddled with secret passages, and that he once saw the Duke putting something in a safe in a secret, cobweby chamber with no windows, accessible only through the secret passages. The Duke never saw him, and he never told anyone about it until now. Plus, this will allow the PCs to interact with two other columns; the ratmen plague in Burlharrow and the orcling pirates on the Darkling Sea. Three birds, one stone.
The fifth and final row hinges on the Grand Duchess, in a ploy born of frustration, impatience, or desperation, or maybe even on accident, summons some kind of daemonic entity to end those who she's buttressed her defenses against, namely the vampire, the seneschal and the Grand Duke himself. This obviously will go wildly wrong, and a daemonic entity will run amok through Waychester until the PCs can put it down.
How this all ends is TBD. What will the PCs do about the Grand Duke? His wife? His corrupt court? The City Watch and Lady's Guard, both of which have turned into secret police, gangsters organized criminals at best? I don't know. You'll have to ask them. But I've got all this stuff set up about what the villains will actually do, and that's how I run. The details of how they accomplish those goals can't be established until I get a handle on the PCs and what they're doing. And even then, details is used somewhat flippantly. I don't believe in detailed planning.
This is the more detailed description, but as you can see there to the side, I've also got the summary, as if it were actually a 5x5 matrix. This is the 1x5 first column of that matrix. And in practice, I'd probably want to whip up a few more details about some of the name-dropped NPCs in this detailed summary. But I also keep in mind Ray Winninger's First Rule of Dungeoncraft; never force yourself to create more than you need. And frankly, this is a lot to go on for now; I won't need anything else for quite some time.
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| Josephine's daemonic shadow assassin |
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