Fallen Empire Campaign Elements Part One: History and Physical Location

I said I'd go through the elements one by one and talk about each one. Let's start with the non-mechanical stuff.

The setting is interesting because there are a lot of different subgenres of medieval fantasy that work with it. That means you can cater a campaign to any hankering your group has. You could even have a couple of different campaigns with the same folks running simultaneously, either with one Ref or more than one running adventures. 

Part One: History and Physical Location

There are about twenty thousand people who live in the city of Port. But the city at its height had one million residents. Over the last eight centuries, the world has cooled and the land supports progressively fewer and fewer people. Therefore the population shrunk and even knowledge has dwindled as culture, learning and the arts become luxury goods and not something anyone can gain access to. The ancients seem like supermen to the people alive today, although they were in reality just more numerous and more prosperous. 

The first thing is, Port is a city. And it's a city-state. There are vast tracts of land, a hundred miles in every direction, that were laid to waste fairly recently.  It's a big city but it's built in the ruins of a metropolis like the world had never known. So the physical layout is a huge walled in area, like a whole six-mile hex. And there are canals and waterways helping to connect various places in the city and some of it is even built on docks. The main economic engine is that it's the center of trade on this huge inland sea. 

When you get away from the waterfront, there are interior walls too. Because over the course of eight centuries, you go from a city of a million people down to a city of twenty thousand. And as various places fall into disuse because they're too expensive and no longer necessary, those areas fall into ruin and eventually revert mostly to nature. So right inside the city you have this strange sort of no-man's land and wilderland vibe. In these areas you have wild animals but you also have a high concentration of  restless dead (remember it's an old old city) and lycans. Plus a lot of it is swampy. You never know what kind of weirdness any particular patch of no-man's land might hold.

So consider, sometimes just going to a different part of town is going to require men at arms or magic wards or a flying spell or clerical acolytes to ward off danger! And among those ruins are treasures long lost to time.

And under the city are layers and layers of the old city, buried over time. In fact, the underworld of the city is called The Layers. The first layer is a vast crypt with the skeletons of millions of dead Port residents. The next layer down is Dwarftown and the attendant mines. The Dwarves are happy to hire people to keep monsters at bay or map out new areas. And then below that is the mythic underworld - a true path to Hell.

Outside the city walls, Port used to be the capital of a medium-sized prosperous country. But about 200 years ago, the old King crossed swords with The Lich and the Lich won. She performed a ritual that leveled all the buildings and destroyed all the infrastructure. There were massive famines, pestilence, and supreme suffering. Some people lived but the nation is no more. The only part of the country to survive mostly intact is the main trade road from Port to the north, and that was because it was too important for other countries that trade with them to allow it to fall completely into ruin. 

In the center of the city, on high ground, is the big castle. For this I intend to use Castle Triskelion. It's where the old ruler lives. He will die almost immediately when the campaign begins. That means his staff will be dispersed and his family will be hauled off by rivals and probably all put to the sword because the Prince was a real bastard behind the scenes.

NEXT TIME: Politics