This campaign, as many of my others, begins amidst hi-jinks and uncertain character configuration. It features aspects similar to most of my other campaigns in general style, too. That's not too odd, seeing as how I DMed them all. For example, while there is economic and political tensions, most of the story is completely separated from it. Instead, a lot of the adventure takes place in a frontier of sorts.
You see, several hundred years ago there was a fairly stereotypical evil empire waging war against most of it's neighbors. The Emperor's tactical knowledge, vast resources, and outright magical power gave him an inarguable advantage. The Empire's borders stretched, nations were enslaved, enemies dispatched, and more power and land were claimed for the Emperor. This lasted for a large chunk of a century, until the Emperor died. He had a good run of things, but age catches up even to powerful mages.
When the Emperor died, the remaining nations which stood in opposition had formed an alliance and had learned how to work together well. In addition, the Emperor's children took in their father's footsteps and sought their own political and literal power, which lead inexorably to infighting and the collapse of the Empire. At this time, the magical machinations of the Emperor's daughter lead to massive deaths and plague within the boundaries of the former empire. It was part of her plan to seize the throne. Since she was killed by her brother before they could be used strategically, she used the last of her power to unleash them generally, in hopes her wrath would see her brother dead as well.
After a while the only people remaining within the borders of the former empire were those who lived in small villages in the wild, most of which the rest of the world were ignorant of. The civilized world had to rebuild fallen cities and kingdoms, find quarters and work for those who had been ravaged and abandoned due the war. There suddenly being no war to fight made these "Good" nations realize how much their alliance relied on a common threat. The alliance faded into the past as each individual nation struggled to restore it's borders and serve it's people while staving off a revolt by the displaced masses.
Few of those nations survived that aftermath, but those which did saw two hundred years of relative peace. There were small wars and large skirmishes, but nothing that even remotely compared to the scale of that last great war. Several nations arose and spread in the West, into the borders of the fallen empire. This expansion is slow, of course, and it causes it's own international tensions. As always, adventurers lead the advancement Westward. The ruins of the once mighty empire are full of riches and artifacts, not to mention the thrill of the adventure as well as powerful magics.
My players compose one of those groups. They go further into the frontier than the other groups, delve deeper into the dungeons, and fight tougher monsters.
In theory. They're actually a goof troop. They get the job done, but they stumble, fall, then get back up so that they can stumble some more. Why, there was a while there where they walked in a circle in the woods, unsure what they should be doing and where. It was a big circle, too. They'd walk towards a goal, then decide they needed to learn more about something and head towards civilization to talk to scholars, just to change their mind and go to a different place, etc. They believed a pair of imps were being totally honest concerning the nature of magical gems they needed to find. More recently, a succubus managed to travel with them for three weeks in the disguise of a bardic friend of the group, and they managed not to pick up on the fact that "he" failed to use any bardic powers they witnessed before or to even simply detect magic and accidentally see that "he" had a spell on him.
Stay tuned for a retelling of these hi-jinks in more detail.
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