Punting on the iconic character fronts

The absolute final punting exercise, and then I’ll be done and be able to pivot to developing Cult of Undeath, is the stuff that I developed for my characters. As a quick reminder, the way that this works is that I prefer to develop what the NPCs will do, especially the villains, antagonists and hopefully eventually nemeses of the PCs. Exactly what THEY do about the actions of these villains is not something that I develop; at best, I will tend to make an extremely handwavey assumption about what the PCs are most likely to do, but nothing about my plan will depend on it, really, because you just never know what PCs will do, and I’m very averse to trying to force them into my paradigm of what I think that they should do. All of my preparation is on the other end, and honestly, it isn’t tons of preparation, because such preparation would be somewhat wasted when the PCs interact with my plans anyway. Best to keep everything pretty vague, high level, and a few bullet points about direction. What is useful preparation is NPC names, images, what their goals are, what the setting looks like, i.e. locations and problems that such locations have, interactions and relationships between NPCs so that when the PCs meet them they end up getting pulled into mafioso-like webs of intrigue and politics that they may not even have anticipated at all.

So, my “fronts” are five separate challenges with their own flavor, sub-theme under the campaign’s greater theme, and NPCS/villains, along with their goals and plans and relationships with each other. Within a campaign, I like to have a mixture of horror/supernatural themed challenges and more “mundane” skullduggery/intrigue themed challenges, but of course, that’s in a broad sense. It’s a dark fantasy setting, so both of those themes are kind of always present to some degree, at least.

Anyway, each of the fronts has a region associated with it too, as a starting point. The biggest “main” front deals with the entire Hill Country region, and has elements of it taking place across the entire region. I also have two reasonably large ones associated with the two biggest subdivisions in the Hill Country; Northumbria and Southumbria. Not only are they politically distinct, but they also are divided by the Umber River, hence the names. The first big front is associated with the soi-dissant nobility of Garenport and their plots, intrigues and troubles, and is pretty supernatural heavy. Northumbria is a more mundane threat; a militant cult is raiding in the region and attempting to throw the hillmen out. (Ironically, as the setting continued to evolve, rather than Northumbria, it ended up being that cult staged itself out of Northumbria but was raiding northern Southumbria. Oh, well.) While not exactly the “orc raids are increasing” type of threat, it does bear some clear parallels to that kind of semi-mundane type of thing. Southumbria a mixed one in terms of themes; thurses (not unlike Warhammer beastmen in many respects)in the Thursewood are on the rise, and war drums are beating under the trees. Part of this is that they’re riled up by a sorcerer making a play for turning himself into a lich by gathering the necessary forbidden books, rituals, etc. necessary, and part of this is the orcling migration through the forest in migrant caravans. Honestly, the various rows of this front only relate to each other by geography in many cases. The final two normal fronts are a seafaring and pirate themed front on the Darkling Sea, featuring orcling pirates and a harrowing shaman who is a favored of Dagon. This could end in a potential Clash of the Titans “release the kraken” type of scenario. The final is the far-flung North Marches stuff up in Burlharrow which involves intrigue, mystery, murder, manufactured plagues, foul ratmen and undead ghouls, with a brief foray (probably) into a Shadow Realm, a separate plane of existence altogether.

But that’s all the stuff that’s prepared regardless of who the PCs are. I also like to create fronts related to the PCs. Of course, in preparing this for the blog, I had to use surrogates, so I have my iconic PCs instead of real ones. I do now have real ones, but given that we’ve only played one session, I haven’t yet developed anything of note for them, only vague ideas.

The villains of my iconic PC fronts are Audley Hardwicke, a disgraced fallen ranger who’s now angry and eager for revenge, and now that his perfidy and corruption was outed, he’s lost any notion of trying to hide it. His sometime girlfriend is the kemling witch Merra Kuzalash, who I don’t intend to play a major role in this campaign, but I’d like to foreshadow her appearance in a future campaign by having her at least pop up. He’s the nemesis of Dominic Clevenger, and to a lesser extent his brother too.

Bethan Argavad is the former fiancé of Kimnor, another iconic PC. She fell victim to the grisling curse, and was supposedly put to death. But… somehow she was not put to death, and was transformed into a dhampir. She’s a real monster, but Kimnor has been broken and grieving in many ways over her for years, so finding out what actually happened to her is probably going to be more traumatic than what he thought happened to her.

Ragnar and his young wife Ciarin, on the other hand, were also attacked a year or so ago by a vampire, Lysander Draven. However, they were always meant to feature more in the Cult of Undeath campaign. My original intention was that the four-man iconic group for the first campaign would have Dominic, Kimnor, Shule and Oisin Dughall. Shule’s character specific thing would have been his hunt for his brother, who was press-ganged by pirates long ago. He now is thriving and serving as first mate on a sloop associated with Captain Taurak’s pirate horde. Oisin Dughall has connections to the Cherskii Mafia, and Vaspar Oksandros is the crime lord who blames him for the death of his brother. Although formerly not located in the Hill country, he’s now actually come this way. I just pictured Kemish and his pirate crew, so below is just Lysander and Vaspar. 

When I post next, I’m going to start filling out my Cult of Undeath skeleton.