Worldbuilding by campaign

I should probably be doing this on this blog, but instead I'm doing it on the old Dark Heritage blog; I've been planning potential campaigns of Dark Fantasy X. One side effect of planning campaigns is that a flood of worldbuilding is the inevitable result of it. I'll shortly be drawing up a new campaign map, that will focus specifically on the Hill Country, since that's where it takes place.

I'm finding a couple of things that I didn't expect:

1) Northumbria is bigger and has more going on than Southumbria. My "Hill Country" column on the 5x5 Front really ended up becoming focused specifically on Brinchshire, which is a name that I hadn't even invented until a couple of days ago. I do see the towns, villages, ranches and whatnot north of the Haunted Forest and the Chokewater Wood as possibly the most iconic part of the Hill Country, so it's natural that that become the focus. Ironically, in the older version of the map, it was very much part of the Dunsbury orbit, which would have been Southumbria. Not sure how to fix that, but it probably means rethinking where the Umber River is. Maybe it isn't the same river as the Chokewater after all, and it runs further north across the southern part of the Golden Wold.

As an aside, Brinchshire is what I expect an older name like Brynachshire would become after time, named because the Brynach population is higher here than in the bigger towns and cities. Maybe Brynachshire actually looks/sounds better, though. Although the Culmer, Brynach, Carlovingia, etc. stuff is nice as a deep backstory reference to the setting, it isn't much use and I doubt I'd refer to them. I'm actually considering moving the Umber River (renamed from the Chokewater River) farther north, so that more territory belongs to Southumbria. That would make a lot more sense, since even back in DH5, the Copper Hills area was associated with Dunsbury, not Waychester. My decision to cut the Hill Country in half didn't really quite work the way I wanted it to, so a little rearranging of the geography is warranted, I think.

2) I'm coming up with more material than I can reasonably use, unless this were a very long or very sustained campaign. If I played weekly for a couple of years, I could possibly still be in just the Chaos in Waychester game, without even getting to Cult of Undeath or Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Waste. Because I'm considering using some iconics and fictionalizing this material too, I'm thinking that I may need... yet another iconic party, so that I can have three different groups off addressing different parts of the plot. (The anti-PC evil party doesn't count for this. I expect that they'll be villains in one of the other campaigns.) This way, these three PC parties can address all of the issues without running all over the place like crazy people. It just made more sense to me that way; if there's any urgency to the situation with the Grand Duke and his wife, or with the Tazitta Death cults, either one, then it doesn't make sense for the PCs to be doing tangents related to the subregional x5 fronts, or the character specific smaller fronts.

I'd had an idea that my "main" protagonist iconic character, Stefan Clevenger, had an older brother who was also a freelance Shadow. Kind of like Racer X to Speed Racer, if you will, although he's not in disguise, and his identity isn't secret. Stefan and this older brother Ragnar aren't exactly estranged, but they don't see each other much, and Ragnar is a little bit hesitant to spend much time with Stefan and his sidekicks, because his wife and Shadow partner Cailin was attacked by a vampire and is "partly turned." This would make her, maybe, a dhampir, which I don't have rules for. But I do have a handy racial traits generator in the appendix (to Hack Fantasy X, at least). Because his wife is half a vampire now, he's a little hesitant to spend too much time with other Shadows, even his brother. In fact, Stefan doesn't even know (at this point) Cailin at all, much less that she's got "a condition."

Anyway, a little too much character building. Here's the rules from my Hack Fantasy X for custom races. I actually hadn't remembered that I'd cut them from Dark Fantasy X, but they're obviously still compatible, and I should think about adding them back in in the appendix.

If you need more options, creating a race is an a la carte option endeavor that's relatively easy to do. Use two Racial Template Points (RTP) and add them to your character at creation. The same RTP can be taken, if desired, more than once. One RTP is equal to either:

• A +1 Stat bonus. This could also include a +1 to AC as natural armor, even though AC isn't normally a "stat" per se.
• Two skill points (i.e., +2 to one skill of your choice, or +1 to two skill bonuses of your choice.)
• A special trait or ability (usually an affinity, as described above in the Expert class. If a character has the same affinity for both race and class, allow them to reroll twice! They clearly really want to be good in that area, and are spending character generation capital to do so at the expense of something else.)
• Another special ability, which can be designed to suit, if desired. Here are a few samples:
• The ability to breathe water as well as air.
• Retractable claws which allow you to climb vertical surfaces.
• The ability to see in the dark as if you have biological night vision goggles.
• The ability to run twice as fast as a regular humanoid creature (+10 to chase rolls.)
• Subject to GM approval, some races may give up the equivalent of a negative RTP to gain an effective third RTP, but I wouldn't do much of this (the wose is an example who has a negative stat bonus and a negative skill bonus.) Otherwise, however, players are strongly encouraged to play around with this race system to create the customized version of their character that they want.

Anyway, here's the new little group. They're less racially diverse, even though one of them is a dhampir; they're all human, though, and in fact, mostly all Hillmen, although one of them has Timischer ancestry.

Ragnar Clevenger, as noted above, is Stefan's older brother (by a year; they're both in the upper 20s.) They both are freelance Shadows, and both are relatively grim and serious in personality as a side effect, most likely, of their profession. Both left the official Shadows at the same time over a controversy with a well-respected Ranger who they had to take down. While they were vindicated for any wrong-doing, and in fact were lauded as unsung heroes by the Ranger organization, their taste for having someone to report to turned sour in their mouths, and they both went freelance. They both have a lot of friends and others who look up to them in the organization still, however. 

Ragnar has a nemesis, that he often spends a lot of time hunting; the vampire who turned Cailin into a dhampir in an attack, back when she wasn't even a Shadow herself and wanted to live a quieter, more peaceful life. He burns with rage and resentment of this vampire, and it has hardened his resolve to hunt the monsters of the Lurking Dark.

Ragnar's wife, Ciarin Adalhild (now Ciarin Clevenger) is the daughter of a landed gentleman from the southern coastal area of the Waychester Bay near Roanstead and Burham's Landing. She's in her early twenties, and her life is defined in part by her "condition"; after an attack by the vampire Lysander Draven which gave her some of the strengths of a vampire, but a vulnerability to some of their weaknesses. It takes constant effort by both her and her husband to keep her change into a vampire halted at the state that it is now. I like how this gives both Ragnar and Ciarin built in character fronts to deal with.

Here's an image of Lysander Draven thrown in for the heckuvit. Because I've got plenty of vampire images. Here, he's got a kind of feral Nosferatu/Orlock look to him. Other vampires might be more suave and urbane.

But I expect Draven to feature more in a Cult of Undeath campaign than in the Chaos in Waychester campaign. 

Fredegar de Vend is the scion of a Normaund family that came to the Hill Country several generations ago with money, so they established themselves as an important part of the gentry in the Karst area south of Waychester. It was actually the de Vend family that was brought in to disgrace by the Clevengers; one of Fredegar's cousins was thoroughly corrupt, and the family patriarch not only knew about it, but profited from it. While his family has lost much of their material possessions as a result of the scandal and the trials and executions that followed, Fredegar does not resent the Clevenger's at all; in fact, he is thoroughly ashamed of his uncle and cousin, and deeply admires the integrity of Stefan and Ragnar. Because of this, he swore an oath, to himself, since neither brother would take it, that he would accompany and protect them. Of course, Ragnar and Stefan do not travel together, so he had to choose, and he ended up with Ragnar, as a kind of noble body guard and martial sidekick.

Dean Bannermane, while also a Hillman, grew up in Simashki where Hillmen were rare. He ran with a bad crowd, although in Simashki that's almost a given, since most crowds are bad. He prefers, now that he's old enough to decide for himself, the company of his own people and his ancestral homeland; he feels more at home in the Hill Country where he's only recently lived than he ever did in Simashki where he was born and raised. 

But... old habits die hard. He prefers life in the bigger cities, where he feels a bit more at home and can make more money. Albeit illegally. He appreciates his association with the freelance Shadows and Rangers, since it allows him to use his skills in a way that benefits society at large, but that's because he's still young and somewhat feckless. Even a life on the touch streets of Simashki hasn't made him cynical.

It's almost time for me to actually build all of these iconic characters using the rules. Now that I've got the better part of fifteen or so of them. Luckily making characters is pretty quick and easy in Dark Fantasy X!