5x5 Fronts: Chaos in Waychester

I've been giving some more thought to the "5x5 Fronts" I described a few days ago (right before I started going crazy with Hero Forge.) I think the way I'll tackle this is to make a "major major" 5x5 Front that is the gist of the campaign brief, and therefore considered to be kind of unavoidable, although exactly what the PCs do with it remains to be seen, of course. This front will have the same name as the campaign, and the resolution of it, in theory, should coincide with the wrapping up of the campaign. Then, I'll have another major front dedicated to the region in which the campaign is set; i.e., the Hill Country for CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER, Timischburg for CULT OF UNDEATH and Baal Hamazi for MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES. Then, I'll also break each region up into two broad sub-regions and have a smaller front for each region, and then have a kind of tangent 5x5 Front in a more far-flung part of the region that the PCs wouldn't otherwise have any reason to go to. Of course, my plans for what's big vs what's small may need to be revised on the fly, depending on how the PCs attach themselves to the various hooks dangling in front of them. They may think one of my "smaller" 5x5 Fronts is more interesting than my major ones, and I'll have to bulk the smaller ones up and possibly thin the major ones down.

(And I still like to have character specific small fronts; something related specifically to each character, but which will end up involving the whole group, since they're together. But obviously I can't plan those in advance, because I have no idea what characters I'd have.)

And I'll still use Hero Forge models, because it's easier to model good-looking character and NPC illustrations with Hero Forge than it is to draw them from scratch. And for today's post, I won't do actual 5x5 matrices, I'll just talk high level about what each of the fronts will be so that I can be better prepared to do the 5x5 matrices down the road. Let's start with the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER, since it's the original campaign brief that I wrote, then we'll do CULT OF UNDEATH and MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES, in that order.

As I brainstorm these ideas, I also want to vary the nature of the threats. I've said before that there are three potential themes to any Dark Fantasy X game (actually I said this about the older Dark•Heritage stuff, but it still applies): 1) supernatural horror, 2) crime and skullduggery, 3) intrigue and espionage. Themes can overlap; purveyors of political intrigue can use witchcraft or daemonology to further their goals, for instance, as can crime lords, but I want these 5x5 Fronts to have variety. 

To accomplish this, I think the three themes suggest that each 5x5 Front be themed more or less along two axes. (Axises? I know that's not correct, but axes suggests a weapon or a tool for cutting wood, and they're homographs and context is perhaps lacking to tell what I mean.) One axis will be brute force vs crafty. An invasion of an army is a brute force theme, while a plot to execute a sudden coup would be a crafty theme. Different 5x5 Fronts can operate on both ends of this axis, but to be more thematically coherent each front should favor one end of the axis over the other, and different fronts in the same game should be at different ends so that the fronts don't have the same feel as each other.

The other axis should be natural vs supernatural. A natural threat could be like Cardinal Richelieu and his henchmen Rochefort and Milady de Winter from The Three Musketeers (masterfully played by Charleton Heston, Christopher Lee and Faye Dunaway respectively in the best video version of that story—although Margot Grahame is beautiful beyond words in the much older version, and Lana Turner is, as always, Lana Turner and therefore not to be ignored, in the one from the late 40s.) Any thriller set in any era will probably give you loads of examples of natural threats. Dr. No. Ernst Blofeld. Solomon Lane. The Agency in the Bourne movies. The Mafia, etc. On the supernatural end of the axis, we have guys who are very typical fantasy villains: monsters, dark wizards and your average Dark Lord of the Week. Vecna (either one.) Strahd. Sauron. Orcus. Etc. Neither end of that axis should be a Platonic ideal, of course. In a fantasy setting, it doesn't make sense that criminal or political masterminds wouldn't make use of supernatural resources when they can, and even the most supernatural force in the fantasy world usually has Joe Blow human cultists running around a fair bit. But the theme and their goals are usually different; the natural mastermind wants to corner political power or something like that, like all of the masterminds mentioned above in the thriller examples, while the supernatural threat wants to do something supernatural; bring a powerful daemonic entity into the world, cast some kind of super-weapon ritualistic spell, etc, and the endgame confrontations for each will be presumably different; either against a man (or woman or demihuman) or against a monster, basically. Although maybe the PCs can't face the main threat directly, and have to defeat it some other way, either because the natural guy has an army of servitors that a handful of plucky adventurers could never hope to fight head-on, or in the supernatural case because a daemon lord or Heresiarch is simply out of reach of even higher level PCs in most cases when it comes to direct confrontation.

I like a front that focuses on crafty and supernatural probably the best, but then again, that's also the most commonly used one in RPGs. Most of the Adventure Paths that I've read (or even read summaries of) do this, and most novels and movies will tend to have a supernatural threat that's often two-pronged; one is crafty and the other is brute force; Sauron sends spies and Ringwraiths to collect the Ring, for instance, but also invades Gondor with a gigantic army. Saruman represents a smaller 5x5 front who mimics Sauron's. Thus, The Lord of the Rings has plenty of sneaking around with small groups, political intrigue especially in Rohan and Minas Tirith, as well as big military stories to tell. Although telling big military stories is often harder when you need to focus on just a handful of characters, of course. Tolkien does it well. Modules that I've read that have a military aspect to them don't; they usually default to the PCs, who are nominally in command of the military, delegating that command to someone else so that they can be the super-special strike team that goes and does some kind of surgical black ops type quest while the military is fighting the war off-screen.

Anyway, it'll still be a fair bit of work (albeit enjoyable work) to develop these, but let's brainstorm a few concepts for some of these, shall we? 

Chaos in Waychester: The campaign brief already lays out the front, although there's a major decision to be made still. Is the Grand Duchess a witch and the cause of all of these problems? Or is she being framed as such, and someone else is at fault? I envision this as a major theme that would last the entirety of the campaign, and its resolution would be the capstone of the campaign. Here's the Grand Duchess, by the way, with her weird alchemical bottles which are suspicious... but only circumstantially, since an interest in alchemy is hardly unique or even unusual in Northumbria.

Curiously, at this point in the campaign, I don't actually need to decide for sure on the Grand Duchess' guilt. The story can start just fine with that being a case of Schrodinger's Guilt—although I won't be able to keep that up for too long, and I can hardly do a 5x5 without deciding that. Either way, the front will have a number of elements already baked in; because regardless of which way it goes, there's major political intrigue as the various power factions line up in support of or in defense against the Grand Duke's move of imprisoning his wife in the tower. The nobility is pretty evenly split, although the Duchess' faction has to be a bit discrete. The Duchess' personal guard unit has turned outlaw and threatens travelers into and out of Waychester. The City Guard of Waychester, on the other hand, is acting like a Stalinist NKVD, and attempting to root out any heresy or sedition. The Hill Country Rangers, which are not affiliated specifically with either Northumbria or Southumbria, are trying to get to the bottom of things, and the regular folk are, like the nobles, split on whether or not the Grand Duchess should be burned at the stake for witchcraft (or at least put before an official public tribunal with that end in mind assuming she's guilty) or the Grand Duke should abdicate in disgrace for making a transparent and tyrannical ploy to consolidate power. And of course, with the cover that a story of witchcraft gives, actual practitioners of witchcraft are feeling a little bit freer hand to get some work done right now while there's an obvious scapegoat.

This is obviously a crafty threat, and although there may well be plenty of natural elements to it (well, actually there are, already baked in) I can't resist making it a supernatural threat too. Whether its the Grand Duchess or some other shadowy player who's framing her, there's someone doing something really dirty and unnatural in Waychester right now.

The Hill Country: Secondly, I need a major regional 5x5 Front that is unrelated to the campaign theme, and which could possibly be used in CULT OF UNDEATH too, since that overlaps the western portion of the Hill Country region. Since all of my campaign briefs suggest a supernatural threat, and probably a crafty one, I'll do all of the regional threats as natural threats—although some are craftier than others rather than brutal. The Hill Country, however, will be a pretty much straight up brute threat; the savages of the Tazitta Death Cult, if you look at the map which is on the shores of the Darkling Sea. The PCs will likely travel through that area in a CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER campaign, and they will be adjacent to it in a CULT OF UNDEATH campaign, so it can easily be used for either. Even if they don't travel through that area, they'll certainly meet people who have, and they can get wind of war drums banging through the coastal badlands, and homesteads, caravans and even entire small settlements being destroyed and plundered for sacrifices to their dark cult. Omens indicate that this is just a prelude to a much more destructive move to come that could make major waves throughout the region if it can't be blunted somehow. 

The Death Cults are a strange mix of savage regular humans of various ethnicities, often led by wose or skraeling champions or shamans. Although "death cult" tends to point towards a supernatural threat, this is actually a red herring; while some of their shamans do indeed practice sorcery, and they do have a handful of monsters in their back pocket for a rainy day, this is a natural threat. I actually see it not unlike the whole Ngonqawuse scenario in Africa; as a reaction to the death cult's failure to accomplish anything, a self-proclaimed prophet is leading the Tazitta peoples in a religious revival as a kind of Hail Mary pass to revitalize his people and give them purpose. Of course, they're not sacrificing their own cattle and dying of starvation; they're sacrificing captives taken from the Hillmen, and inviting (eventually) military reprisals that will likely wipe them out. The solutions the PCs come up with could range from leading militias into the cult Badlands, carrying out assassinations against the shaman and chiefs who are leading these, or a personal challenge if they think assassination is beneath them, or even missionary efforts to convert the people of the cult away from their beliefs. Anything goes.

Northumbria: A sub-regional threat, that could be smaller, or could be as big as the one above, is the Chersky Island in the middle of the Darkling Sea. Uninhabited since the time that colonists from Baal Hamazi tried to establish a port there two or three hundred years ago which fell apart prior even to the collapse of that dark Empire, a number of orcs and goblins have settled in the ruins more recently. Since the numbers flowing northward from Gunaakt were too large for the borderlands to support, unemployed and restless orclings (a word meaning both orcs and goblins as a collective race with two morphs) have attempted to claim the empty island for themselves and establish a new colony. This is all well and good, but not all of the orclings are happy with homesteading, farming and fishing, and some have taken up piracy on the sea lanes of the Darkling Sea instead. The nature of this threat is very natural, but its also somewhat morally ambiguous. No nation had claimed Chersky Island, except for some half-hearted words here and there out of Waychester and Lomar, so the settlement of the orclings isn't really seen as a problem by their governments. Indeed, the settlers are mostly just regular people trying to find a place for themselves and their families on an island where they can be left alone and leave everyone else alone in turn. But the pirates that are also on the island are a threat to their progress. It's also a threat to trade between Lomar, Waychester and Cayminster, and representatives of any of those places could well petition anyone that they can for aid against the pirate threat.

The pirates themselves are also a mixed bag. Many are simply "happy go lucky" swashbucklers (although their victims don't see them as such) but others are a bit darker, and represent cultic elements that have thrown in with strangeness from the Plateau of Leng, or infiltrators from that place. Which is, after all, nearby. If I (or the players, more to the point) really want to follow that up with an investigation on the plateau itself, that's one way it could go, although I don't see (at this point, anyway) the campaign going that direction unless the PCs really get obsessed with doing something there. Which could be fun, although quixotic; it's not like any PCs could ever tear down Kadath and the threats that it houses.; they're way beyond the ken of even the highest level PCs.

Southumbria: If I'm going to do one sub-region, I should have a look at the other. The PCs will almost certainly have to travel through the ruins of Rabb's Hill on the road from Dunsbury to Burham's Landing, where they can take a ship to Waychester (there are no roads through the karst Waychester peninsula; but even if they decide for some weird reason to bushwhack across the wilderness rather than take a ship, they still have to take that same road, since Burham's Landing is at the base of the peninsula.) Rabb's Hill and the "Rabb's Hill Burn" has been in ruins for a generation now, and the thurses have been quiet, presumably because so many were killed at the running Battle of Rabb's Hill. However, the PCs, while on this trip, can find a caravan or wain convoy in disarray near the site of the old town of Rabb's Hill; they've been robbed and a few of their members, including a noble's daughter from Roanstead, are missing. As is a significant portion of treasure that they were transporting. 

What neither the PCs nor the wainriders know is that the treasure included an anonymous magical MacGuffin of TBD significance to a dark and lone sorcerer deep in the woods, and at least some of the missing people from the caravan were his agents, poised to make off with the MacGuffin and the Damsel In Distress right as they got as close to his lost tower in the woods as the road would take them. This sorcerer is bad news, but he's not necessarily interested in what's going on beyond his forest; he mostly just wants the secret of turning himself from a sorcerer into either a vampire or a lich, as he's getting a bit on in years and the threat of death is looming over him. However, his increased activity has caused unrest in the thurses of Thursewood, so much of Southumbria is potentially at risk of raids from them; deep in the forest, their numbers have grown faster than the poor Southumbrians would ever have imagined, and they are now actually more powerful than they were during the Rabb's Hill business.

The PCs don't necessarily need to do anything about the thurses directly, however; although hopefully they don't want to do anything that would inadvertently stir them up. The real goal is to rescue the D.I.D. and hopefully destroy the sorcerer, which would likely put the thurses in disarray somewhat, and point their aggression somewhere else other than towards Southumbria. 

Of course, if it's pointed towards the migrant route from Gunaakt, any orcling PCs might not like that any better, so it could potentially have legs beyond the immediate problem and its solution.

Burlharrow: Burlharrow is a far-flung town, on the very top right corner of the map, with cultural and trade and political ties (albeit somewhat tenuous) to Waychester. Recently, no caravans have come from Burlharrow to Cayminster, and from there to board ship for Waychester or elsewhere. This includes caravans that are based in Cayminster, which are overdue and missing. Burlharrow's in a bit of a tight strait; a plague has stricken the town. However, all is not as natural as it seems; the plague was cooked up by ratlings from the forest, who view all of humanity (and demihumanity) with hostility. It's a dry-run of something that they hope to have spies unleash on an even more populated area later in the year. However, there's an additional complication. Some unscrupulous closeted sorcerer or necromancer has taken advantage of the rash of deaths and the growth of the town cemetery, and now a plague (no pun intended) of ghouls is feasting on the bodies, digging up graves, and causing all kinds of mayhem. Reports of ghost-sightings and hauntings is on the rise too. The whole place is a hot mess—although because it's somewhat isolated, I don't intend to make this a major campaign thread that would run through the entire campaign. It's more of a "go there and fix their problems and then come back to the main game after that" kind of thing.

In reality, it's always possible, of course, that the PCs don't take an interest in all of these problems. That's OK, but they will eventually hear of the advance of the threat that they ignored. It's reasonable, for example, to think that the PCs, having been tasked with traveling to Waychester and investigating the stuff with the Grand Duchess, would decide to leave the Southumbrian threat be, since it's outside of the scope of what they think that the campaign is, and would delay them from dealing with their main goal. But when Hill Country Rangers start disappearing from Northumbria, because they're all heading to Southumbria to deal with thurses, and towns and villages are either getting wiped out, or under siege, or traffic from Southumbria to Northumbria just stops altogether except for streams of refugees, the PCs will realize that they left a problem unresolved that's causing major issues, and may have to go try and correct that as best they can.

Or maybe they don't care and they let Southumbria burn until it can fix its problems itself, but then it's left with diminished population and ruined settlements. That kind of thing has certainly happened in real life, and if that's what the PCs allow to happen, well, that's what happens. Meanwhile, there'll be plenty of fires for them to fight in Northumbria. Southumbria won't be completely destroyed due to their being somewhere else, it'll just take a much harder blow from the thurses than it otherwise would. I know that leaves a kind of Mr. Incredible kind of vibe: "I just saved this place; can you stay saved for ten minutes?" but that's the nature of this kind of game. If there isn't something threatening the status quo, why not just hang up your adventuring gear and become homesteaders or farmers or artisans or politicians, or whatever, amirite?