Yesterday while in a waiting room, I busted out one of the many notebooks and journals that I try to remember to carry around with me exactly for this reason and jotted down some ideas for the final official x5 column of the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER 5x5. I should point out that this doesn't mean, of course, that I'm ready to run after this post is finished. This 5x5 structure is pretty bare bones, high level—more of a treatment than an actual screenplay to use a Hollywood analogy. For some purposes, this is OK and in fact desirable. The whole point in doing it this way as opposed to writing a traditional campaign module or adventure path is to give the PCs freedom to focus more on the threats that they find more interesting and less attention to what they do not; plus, some of the down-column entries do make a few assumptions about what PCs will do or will have already done that may or may not turn out to actually be true. It's more of a vague guide of what I expect that can't be finalized until the rubber hits the road. Or the PCs hit the gaming table, to be more precise. To quote Ray Winninger's classic "DungeonCraft" series, "Never force yourself to create more than you must." You don't need much to start. A high level outline like this, with a few details for the first few sessions is sufficient to get going. Not only that, I might have better ideas as the campaign rolls along, probably sparked by the players themselves and things that they do, so having the freedom to rewrite down-column entries is nice.
But the very earliest up-column entries will be encountered within the first session or two, and in order to actually be useable, they do need some definition and detail. But that can wait until I've finished creating the 5x5 matrix. I'll also want to create some potential encounters and finds for random things that happen to them while traveling. I'm officially integrating my appendix travel rules in to the main ruleset as "Appendix II." Longtime readers (ha! as if!) may recall that earlier versions of the rules did have encounter tables in the appendix that were heavily influenced in their format by the travel stuff in the Expert set of the B/X series, but I removed them deliberately. This new travel system more closely resembles this system described here in a blog post. It doesn't require the same preparation, but it does require some preparation, and I haven't yet done so for the setting, so I'll put something together before I start playing. I'll need some other things too; my old Dark•Heritage homemade GM screen (I just printed some WAR images on cardstock for the front panels, and created my own stuff in Word and Excel for the back side, laminated them and attached them with clear packaging tape. It worked, but wasn't beautiful.) I had stuff like name lists so I could name NPCs on the fly if they encountered someone I didn't expect, and other stuff like that which, given the way I run, I need to have to be as successful as I want to be. So there's some work involved in actually preparing this to get out of the gate, even though getting the 5x5s done is the major thing that needed doing.
Anyway, before I do this, I should stick with my custom and offer some background setting material that's relevant to either this 5x5, or at least this column of the 5x5. I thought about some detail on the very northern part of the Hill Country region, which I haven't really talked about much because I've been more focused on south and central Hill Country areas. When I next come back with a 5x5, after all, I'll be in Timischburg doing the CULT OF UNDEATH 5x5!
(Well... actually, I'm going to use my Dark Fantasy X Iconic Group 1 as an example and show you how I'd do a 5x5-like structure that is character specific. This is just for show, though. If I run this, I'll actually have PCs that my players have made, not iconics that I've made. In any case, I can do some more setting background as I do those too.)
I've long suggested that much of the Dark Fantasy X setting is meant to be an analog to the American West, my true home (even though I live in the northeastern Midwest in real life, that's not my home. That's just where I live because of work. My heart belongs in the Rocky Mountains and southwestern deserts.) The spine of the Sabertooth Mountains could be seen in some ways as an analog to the Rockies. That doesn't mean that it's meant to be too exact of an analog—for one thing, I tend to assume that the climate is more mild, with warmer winters and cooler summers than you get in, say, Wyoming, where both can be pretty brutal. And this applies much more to the Hill Country specifically than it does to the stuff even further to the west; Timischburg and Baal Hamazi are hardly supposed to be similar to California and the PNW, even though geographically maybe you'd expect that. While the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER game would take place entirely to the east of the Sabertooths, the Hill Country—sorta—does spill across the range, especially up in the north. I've long said that the Hill Country can be divided into two halves; Northumbria which is dominated politically, culturally and socially by Waychester, and Southumbria which is dominated politically, culturally and socially by Dunsbury, and the two are rivals sometimes for what the vision of the Hill Country should be. In spite of this, both halves are made up of the same people, with the same ethnic origins and whatnot.
In reality, there's a "third half" that doesn't really look for guidance to either, and is too far flung from either to be dependent on them anyway. This is the region up in the far northwest, near Bucknerfeld, the largest town of this region. Being on the shores of the Indash Salt Sea, and nestled in between non-Hillmen settled areas, the Hillmen here aren't necessarily quite as dominant, and have to share the territory with some others who are also here; plus the climate isn't quite as forgiving. From Bucknerfeld, Hillman hamlets and settlements continue along the road until the crossroads in the Vajol Downs, at which point you're more likely to run into traffic and settlement related to Lower Kurushat, or even leftover from the days when Kurushan power was ascendant along the shores of a much larger Indash Sea and the Great Northern Road was heavily trafficked. In those older days, the Hillmen hadn't even expanded beyond the Sabertooths at all, and the Kurushans were only vaguely familiar with their existence.
Although not shown on the map, with the exception of the Rackgrove's Folly, smaller Hillmen settlements, towns, hamlets, homesteads and ranches range all through the Cactus Balds, the western foothills of the Sabertooth Mountains. Because the mountains themselves and the Boneyard desert farther to the west are very lightly inhabited by anyone or anything at all, the Hillmen who spread into this zone encountered no resistance or complaints at their setting up their homes other than environmental; the western lands are considerably drier than the eastern lands until you hit the Onyx Peaks and the Black River, at which point you are leaving the Boneyard and crossing in to the northern marches of Timischburg. These small communities rarely if ever have any trafficking of any kind with either Dunsbury or Waychester, and have evolved in isolation from the concerns of either. Their only guidance, if you want to call it that, from a more major metropolitan center comes from Bucknerfeld, and Bucknerfeld is strange for a Hillman town, being independent, but also in sheltering a larger plurality of non-hillman, and being much more focused on caravan traffic across the Great Northern Road. This traffic has started to pick up again in recent years after decades of isolation and what really should be considered a short dark age enveloped the northern lands of Lower Kurushat and Baal Hamazi. As these northern lands started to rebuild themselves as smaller, autonomous city-states in the wake of the collapse of strong Imperial power from either of their mother regions, they looked more to having friendly commercial and political relationships with their neighbors, and the relatively newly arrived Hillmen were an important component there. Bucknerfeld is the only place where jann, kemlings and Hillmen cross paths on a regular basis, and the Hillmen provide an important link between the western kemling and jann countries and Lomar and the Hyperboreans further east.
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| A prosperous Jann trader who regularly passes through Bucknerfeld on his runs between Lomar and Simashki |
The northern shore of the Darkling Sea is also disconnected from the rest of the Hill Country; although you can travel by land to this area, you will pass through the separate polity of Lomar to do so (discussed in the past), and most people arrive from Waychester or elsewhere by ship. Cayminster is the largest town here, and while it has strong commercial, political and cultural ties to Waychester, the hinterlands beyond is much more independent and has, at best, a kind of resentful dependency for some things from the bigger cities. They prefer to be left alone and not get involved in anything from the cities; from commercialism, to politics to even fashion, where they are stubbornly and in fact defiantly rustic.
There are, again, many smaller communities which the map does not show, but Burlharrow is the largest of those that does show up on the current iteration of the map. (By large, I mean a few thousand people, though. Burlharrow in size should be comparable to some of the classic D&D and Pathfinder small starting towns like Hommlet, Sandpoint or Saltmarsh, etc.)
North of the Darkling Sea, the land is mostly clear of trees, except for relatively small stands, copses, or riparian stretches of forest. It mostly looks like shrub savanna with rolling hills, occasional lakes, streams or other waterways where thicker vegetation and trees grow, and small buttes, mesas and other rock formations that pop up too. The ground slopes steadily yet slowly upwards too, and once you hit high enough elevation, you get to the southern eaves of the Wolfwood, the great boreal forest that separates the Three Realms from whatever lies to the north (Old Hyperborea, Kurushat proper, etc.)
Burlharrow also specifically lies in the floor of a shallow valley, and small lakes and marshes surround the town, but make for good irrigation for farming and the watering of herds; it's much drier in the rolling hills around town. The lieutenant-mayor of Burlharrow, one Gothbert Erhard, is determined to make Burlharrow independent. The mayor himself (Gunne Woodrow) is weak, indecisive and self-indulgent, and has become moreso over the years, so his advisors and other powerful people in town have taken to ignoring him and attempting to enact their own agendas, for good or ill. As rumors of the nonsense happening in Waychester that makes up the first column of the 5x5 reaches his town, Erhard is even more committed than ever to this independence-minded course of action for the good of the region. However, other relatively wealthy and powerful players in town make a lot of their money with trade through Cayminster, much of it ultimately destined for or coming from Waychester. As this difference in opinion becomes more rancorous over time, the two factions have even acquired labels: the Loyalists, who favor closer ties with the cities to the south and west, and the Sovereigns who see Burlharrow as culturally but not politically allied with any of the greater powers with their intrigues and ambitions on the entire Hill Country region. In this, they are more similar to the Southumbrians, who also resist Waychester dominance and the Grand Duke's ambition to turn the Hill Country into the Hill Kingdom with himself as the first king, but Southumbria is far away and has its own local concerns rather than ambitions on bringing Burlharrow into its orbit. That said, Lieutenant-Mayor Erhard looks to Dunsbury as a model for how to create an independent political axis as long as you have enough geography between yourself and Waychester, and has even recruited a few Southumbrian advisors and others to support him; the militia captain of Burlharrow (Berold Geissfalk) was a successful soldier in his youth in the Rabb's Hill campaign in the south, and then retired from the Rangers. Erhard has also started an aggressive plan to lure homesteaders to the countryside around Burlharrow. There is plenty of open and empty (well.. empty-ish. You know how it goes) land to the south, along the eastern edge of the Darkling Sea. This is still an initiative in its infancy. Of course, the Loyalists, led by Dockmaster Murchad Gibson is alarmed by the attempt to grow his opposition by migration of people who have every reason to be Sovereigns and oppose the Loyalist agenda.
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| Gothbert Erhard |
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| Berold Geissfalk |
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| Murchad Gibson |
Anyway, this is the context in which the Burlharrow column of the 5x5 will be set. First, assuming that the PCs are playing along and biting on the hooks that I've set up for them, the first column would have them going to Burlharrow anyway to look for Morcant, the Duchess' former huntsman, who's got important clues about the whole "who's actually got a canopic talisman and who doesn't" affair. If they don't, however, someone they trust, like a Ranger, or someone else can set more hooks that there's urgent trouble up there that needs some attention right away. In reality, the town is beset with a plague, but it's not a natural plague, and the townspeople suspect that it isn't. Rats are all over the town, staring at people unnaturally, showing little timidity, and generally being creepy. Reports of rats the size of dogs attacking people are starting to make their way around town. This is true. The plague is man-made. Or... well, ratman-made. And the rats are the delivery vehicle for it. Why is some ratman trying to depopulate Burlharrow? Actually, the ratmen don't really care about Burlharrow at all; it's just a dry run of a new plague that they've developed. Of course, ultimately, they want to depopulate much of the rest of the Hill Country and spread from their home on Leng in the lands where humans once lived. (Wow, this could be a whole 'nother column by itself. But I'm not developing it for now.)
Secondly, the rats need to be stopped before they can spread more of the plague. While they've gotten bold enough to wander the streets by day, they can be traced to a nest outside of town which they normally enter through the sewer systems. Here the PCs will not find the absolute source of the plague, but they will discover lots of swarms of rats, some giant rats, and a handful of ratmen and maybe even a rat brute (see monster list.) This confirms that the plague wasn't natural. They'll find some clues here, though, that with a little effort and investigation will lead them back in to town (maybe not right away; other problems will also be pressing on them; see below) where they will discover that the mayor himself had something to do with the ratmen; they have his signet right in their possession among the detritus of the nest.
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| Ratmen from the rat nest |
Thirdly, because so many of the townsfolk died so quickly, the graveyard outside of town hasn't really been properly tended to; many of the townsfolk have been buried hurriedly in shallow graves. As sometimes happens when graveyards are poorly tended, necromancy seems to coalesce almost of its own will, as if a malignant force with its own sentience, and ghouls are starting to plague the town; also stealing victims, eating them, or otherwise turning them into ghouls in their own right. While fighting off ghouls who have also become too emboldened to be left alone (I imagine, possibly an attack on the inn at night; which I'll conveniently locate kind of on the edge of town near the graveyard.) Curiously, through much of this trouble, the mayor has been seen very infrequently.
They'll find that there are quite a few more ghouls and bodies than they would expect from the townsfolk, and through a series of clues which I haven't yet invented, they could eventually be able to discover that many of the recently arrived settlers and homesteaders who have set off to establish and build homes in the hinterlands have been murdered and brought here. This is a major black eye on Erhard's plan to grow the region into an independent place that doesn't need Waychester, but even more so because it turns out that Geissfalk has been murdering them. He's brought in a number of mercenaries to stiffen the militia, who are actually little more than brigands, pirates and other murderers and criminals, and he did it because he was paid off by the mayor himself to blunt Erhard's plans, in spite of the fact that he showed up (publicly) at Erhard's request in the first place!
Of course, I imagine that everyone will want to confront the mayor when they discover this, but if they attempt to, they will find that the mayor has been dead for two weeks, and he's been Weekend at Bernie's-ified around town while mostly being holed up in the mayor's mansion. There are more ratmen there, as well as the ratmen mad scientist who created the plague, and rat brutes eating the flesh of the mayor's dead household and servants. The PCs can eventually discover two important things at the mayor's place: 1) the mayor was actually murdered and had nothing to do with the plague; it was Gibson who murdered the mayor, offered Burlharrow to the rats for their experiment, and paid off Geissfalk to murder the settlers and homesteaders, and 2) there is a horrible black book made of dried and withered human skin with the remnants of a face on the front cover. It will take the PCs some time to decipher and read this book, and it will have many of the same problems as a magical tome or grimoire, save with a study time in days instead of weeks and its not really about spells (although if any PCs are in to that, they could find a couple); it does have a cure for the plague detailed in it, though. In a pinch, the dried leather human face on the cover could even whisper the hints to the PCs.
I imagine that many sanity checks could be made as a result of what's found in the mayor's mansion. I love it.
Fourthly, hopefully the PCs are willing to bite on that hook all its own, but while they're perusing the book, the plague's real diabolical nature starts to make itself manifest; some of the townsfolk who survived contracting the plague are now turning into plague-zombies on their way towards becoming ghouls as a secondary set of symptoms, and have to be put down, probably. The situation is now quite dire, as they can probably deduce that the experiment has been going on longer than they thought and that's the source of the ghouls in the graveyard that they faced earlier.
Unfortunately, and fifthly, the cure isn't exactly easy to get. It involves, in fact, finding a rotted fairy ring in the woods nearby (referenced or whispered by the Book) and traveling to the Shadow Realm, a parallel realm similar to the Plane of Shadow or the Upside-down, to use two references that most will probably get. I'm a little hazy on what exactly they'll need to do here, and maybe I can play it by ear as I get closer. I'm thinking that they need to find one of the shadow rosebushes with black roses and bring back enough of the flowers to brew a cure, but fighting off undead and minor daemons, and avoiding daemons that are probably over their heads to defeat, like a nosoi daemon might be involved.
I also like the idea that having traveled to this Shadow Realm and partaken of a black rose draught, that they will be marked going forward in some subtle way that will be plot hooky in the future, although again; need to determine exactly how that will play out as I get closer to it actually happening. I'm thinking of giving them a benefit/cost; something that's a cool thing to have, but also there's a cost to it. Shadowy animal companion for the group, and an improved resistance to any disease or poison, but their shadows now occasionally move independently of them. It takes them a while to realize out of the corners of their eyes, and they start to suspect that they've brought back something with them that they can't identify and confront, but which was not invited...
——( † )——
Anyway, that concludes the main body of the 5x5. As you can see, it's not really meant to be "runnable" in the sense that a module is. But it's also meant to be fluid and flexible. If I need to develop details—and I will—then I'm only going to need to invent details a session or two in advance at most, and other than that, the 5x5 is more for me to keep track of what the major NPCs and antagonists are plotting rather than what the PCs will be doing. The players will decide that, not me. All I can do is come up with hooks that I hope will be interesting enough for my fish to bite on, and then pay attention at the table to see what they're really taking an interest in and what they seem to be more apathetic or indifferent to, and trying to make sure that they get more of the former and less of the latter.
If large chunks, or even entire columns get ignored the PCs, that's OK. There's no requirement that they investigate every last lead on every last hook in this game. I can decide what (if anything) happens with hooks that they ignore. Some of them will mean that the villains advanced their plots with a free hand because the PCs weren't around to stop them, and will result in negative repercussions that the PCs will start to see in the setting as the game goes on. Others will... well, if the PCs aren't interested in them, maybe I don't need to be either. I won't feel too committed to them, because I didn't do too much development in advance, just a bare treatment that can have details hung on it when and as needed.
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