Nightlands: Adventuring

Adventuring in a world like the Nightlands should be suitably different from other campaigns. Notably, the party would like be seen as crazy to even think of walking out of the gates in such a small group. In normal settings, the wilderness is dangerous, sure, but common. Farmers live on the edge of civilization themselves. They aren't happy with it, but they are used to fighting wild animals and the occasional bandits. Adventurers are unusual for their desire to throw themselves into danger for the promise of some coins or for the good of their brothers, but not crazy.

The Nightlands aren't normal wilderness. They are cursed and evil. They change people over time. This is common knowledge, bloated and exaggerated through years of rumors and hearsay. Everyone has a friend's girlfriend's cousin's grandfather who once went with a military group into the Nightlands, only to come back crazy. Everyone knows that it's only safe inside the walls of Lumina. People who decide that they want to make a living by heading outside the gates to fight cursed monsters and demons are probably considered unstable by some and dangerously insane by most.

Herein actually lies a problem I've seen with this world so far. If the Nightlands are dangerous and basically impossible to penetrate for the normal person, how are any features of the Nightlands known well enough to even send the adventurers after? Typically in D&D, someone with money will ask the party to do something, with a promise of reward. It's a fairly basic quest structure, and money is commonly a decent motivator. Wouldn't it be considered an insult to even ask someone to go out there? It's akin to saying "Err, there's a quarter at the bottom of that meat grinder. I'll give you fifty bucks if you jump into it and get that quarter for me."

Then again, if the party is known as one of those crazy groups that is willing to risk all the dangers of the Nightlands for coin, it makes sense that they would get requests to explore/loot/retrieve things nearby the town. That's something to work out later.

Anyway, so adventuring in the Nightlands is different. One way I think I'll make it different from other worlds I've played in is that it's basically unexplored. It's a rare thing that concrete human knowledge lasts much more than a few hundred years. What we know about cultures more than three thousand years ago can basically be summed up in a small pamphlet. The Nightlands, according to the first post, have been this way for 'millenia'. This is effectively since time immemorial. What is known about the Nightlands is what can be observed from the town walls, combined with information from the trading caravans and military excursions done decades ago.

So the party makes their name running errands for some mooks in town, or they are well known bar brawlers, or whatever else. They are now level one, and feeling buff and brawny enough to head out into the breach. They can possibly procure a 'map' of the Nightlands, but nothing more than a few miles from Lumina would be accurate in the slightest. Sure, the landmasses might not have changed all that much, but towns that existed thousands of years ago will probably not exist anymore, except as barely recognizable ruins. Actually, even the coasts have moved and changed. Volcanoes erupt and expand the coastline here, a sea cave has collapsed and removed a few miles of coastline. Nothing produced thousands of years ago is accurate at all.

So as opposed to your normal party heading southwards towards that castle ruin on their map, the Nightlands group can head southwards and hope that something remains of the castle that they read about in the engravings in another ruin. Of course, from the walls of Lumina, one can see a few features scattered about. All that anyone in town knows for certain is what they can see from the walls, or from scaling the wizard's tower in the center of town as high as they dare.

Come to think of it, I don't believe I've placed Lumina in any particular type of terrain, other than one that can support a river and presumably has some area that can be mined through without flooding. It does have to be basically free of major natural disasters, so that it's still standing and in reasonable shape despite having no outside assistance for centuries. Ok, we'll put Lumina on a temperate plains sort of area. Mostly flat land around, with some rolling hills in the distance. Since the outside lands have been free of human(oid) deforesting for so long, it's slightly wooded now, limiting vision to major features. The river flows somewhat lazily over such terrain, but the occasional flooding can be controlled via floodgates built by the golems that protect the city. This means the dwarves likely had to dig through quite a depth of soft, spongy soil before getting to proper stone. Still, one presumes that dwarves don't mind mining a bit.

A terrain set like this gives the citizens of Lumina some tantalizing proximity to a few ancient structures. They can see them, but they know they can't explore them. Attempts to explore usually end in death for everyone involved, because it's dangerous and stupid to go outside the walls, as we've covered. So this provides a starting point for groups that announce a desire to head into the Nightlands. That ruined tower that the populace sees to the north, when the menacing dark seems to lighten a bit, is a suitable dare for this bigshots to go to. How's that for an opening tavern quest?

Instead of the dark stranger offering information, or the random noble who seems to hang out in bars hoping to find someone to get his lost family amulet, you can have the local neighborhood street toughs irritated by the party in there acting like big shots. The PCs think they are so tough? Fine, go to Northtower then. Stay there overnight, and bring something back that proves you were there, big shot. This has the effect of showing the party as capable of going into the Nightlands without dying, as well as establishing some low level jerks in town that can act as mild antagonists while the party is there.

Well I've been going on long enough here. The point is that adventuring in the Nightlands should have a feeling of going into the unknown. No one knows what dangers await out there, and they generally think you are crazy for even wondering.

More on the Nightlands later.

Nightlands: Lumina

Ok, another valid line of inquiry is Lumina itself. What kind of place is it? It's obviously important; it's the starting location for the players. Is it big? Small? All human or a mix of cultures? What kind of rules and laws exist? How does it survive being in a darkened world? What sort of adventures can be had in the city before even venturing out into the nightlands?

I like Lumina being a city, with perhaps a river running through it. The entire haven is urbanized heavily, but with a bit of a catch. Since the place has been so insular for so long, districts and small communities have formed. This sounds a bit like some Warcraft/Stormwind stuff, but bear with me. This allows for some flavor to the city. The dwarves have their walled district, though they allow access fairly freely. They also have tunnels and underhalls that run through most of the haven, and even slightly outside, though those tunnels get dangerous and decrepit very quickly, as though the stone itself were cursed. Because it is. The dwarves thus help sustain the metal industry, crafting new metal tools and limited weapons. They also are useful for general wealth, gemstones and the like. We are taking a bit of stretch on how much metal and how many gems would be under a normal city, but that can be useful too. Maybe certain materials aren't present in the haven and must either be traded for or found by PCs. Maybe later in the campaign, the dwarves delve too deep. Not that I'd ever copy anything.

The elven district can help with food. Elves and Eladrin can both live here because let's face it, they are just 3e elves split up a bit. Anyway, Elves tend massive hanging gardens and even underground cave farms, providing wood and food for the greater part of the city. Elves are also hired by nobles and wealthy from elsewhere in the city as groundskeepers, maintaining nice green spots all over town. Eladrin, for their part, work in quiet, contemplative monasteries and universities in this district, working on magic to fuel the city's continual population increase, trying to find new ways to help their brethren continue the plant growth as more and more demand is created. Certainly a few enterprising adventurers could procure ancient texts from the nightlands and possibly be well rewarded.

Humans and halflings, as well as most half-elves, can live in the main city. A traditional if highly-compact fantasy city. Mostly stone and woodwork, though by necessity the buildings stand multiple stories high, packed tightly and somewhat chaotically over each other and bridging streets. This gives plenty of shadows and dark alleys for theives, but this district has a particularly strong police force. The town guard is mostly humans, with a few dragonborn and dwarven mercenaries thrown in. Tieflings also live in this district, not expressly outlawed, but subject to a great deal of racism. Face it, demonic ancestry tends to do that. Adventure hooks in the human district are fairly bog-standard fantasy fare. Thieves, town guard quests, organized crime, fetch-and-carry, whatever.

That leaves dragonborn. I like them being a somewhat insular community, staying mostly to themselves. They have a fairly quiet, orderly district that is really more of a neighborhood. They are few in number and carefully control their reproduction, so their community is more standard construction. Nice stonework buildings, but mostly street level with a single residence per building on the second floor. They are expert craftsmen, traders, soldiers, and guardsmen. I would say that adventures here are hard to come by, as the PC party is unlikely to be trusted without a dragonborn character. If they have a dragonborn, perhaps another group has stolen something held dear by the dragonborn, and the PC can be hired to bring it back. It's also possible that their district is so small due to being marginalized by the other races, and the PCs could be hired to find a new haven for the dragonborn, outside of Lumina.

I'd say that goblins and orcs are nonexistent in LUmina. They have to stay outside. No half-orcs either, thanks to 4e.

So Lumina is a city divided into districts. Fine, we'll cover politics of these districts later on. What protects Lumina from the horrors of the nightlands? Stout defenders on the walls? What about flying menaces? Bowmen?

I think I'll go the high-magic route and do something else. Lumina was a haven to begin with because of a secluded wizard. His tower was here (still is) and he created a number of golems to defend the place. Iron golems, bronze colossi, I don't know yet. So they built walls, running on the base instruction to defend the city and her inhabitants. I suppose the walls contain vertical bars over the river to filter out water monsters while allowing edible fish. Golems being immortal, they still walk the walls, maintaining the magical dome that keeps flying menaces at bay and defending against larger threats when required. They do their best to ignore the residents, and only give boring, mechanical answers when forced. The residents now mostly ignore them. Strangely even if they are destroyed, new constructs arrive very shortly to replace them. The wizard is apparently still active in his sealed tower, in the center of the city. Since it's been thousands of years, he's either undead or it's an automated process. The citizens typically prefer to not think about it. He doesn't affect their lives negatively, but wizards are fickle and strange, and there's no reason to provoke him.

So we've covered racial districts, some political tension, food, water, metal, wood, and protection. What's left? Well, religion is a tremendously important part of sapient life in any era. The predominant religion of an area has always defined laws, moral codes, and way of life. Of course, D&D has sort of a lax view on religion. A polytheistic pantheon of gods, with no real strife except along alignment lines, usually really only along good/evil lines. So basically a weird approximation of the God/Satan dualist relationship, split into around a dozen or so. I haven't really read up on the 4e religious changes, though I know there are a few. We'll go with major gods from Greyhawk and hack it later as required.

Obviously in a world like this, Pelor is considered the chief god of civilization. He is light and warmth incarnate; the sun that rises and falls, shining down on Lumina from afar, keeping it from the eternal night outside. Pelor is often considered the primary human deity, and that makes a lot of historical sense. Name two ancient pantheons that didn't include the sun as a major god.

Aside from Pelor, I'd imagine the other gods are worshiped in turn as well. Physical strength has always been important, so Kord is useful to fighters, warlords, and the odd cleric. Corellon Larethian is of course still patron of the elves, and probably the eladrin as well. Obad-Hai is revered in and around the elven district. I would imagine someone like Fharlanghn, the god of roads and travel, is nearly forgotten by ordinary folk in Lumina. Dwarves of course still have Moradin. As I recall, Bahamut was introduced as a deity proper in 4e, for dragonborn, so there's that.

As far as it matters for play, I would wager that in a heavily urbanized town with such limited space, small shrines would be common in homes, but for any sort of cleric services, one would need to find the large cathedral of Pelor, somewhere in the human district. This building would likely be hugely important in society, and nearly anyone in the city would be able to give directions instantly. There are smaller woodland shrines and groves for Obad-hai and Corellon Larethian, as well as large underground temple-forges for Moradin. As is typical with religion, however, I suspect that clergy of racial gods don't favor those of other races visiting their shrines. This goes for Bahamut also.

Bahamut is a special case. Most of the other gods have boring incarnations. Pelor, for instance, is typically depicted as basically Gandalf. Bahamut and Tiamat both are glorious dragons, full of astounding physical awe and wonder. The dragonborn of Lumina, despite being only a small community, have nonetheless crafted an imposing statue shrine of Bahamut in their district square. A sixty foot tall dragon, with a wingspan easily double that, carved from marble in the center of the square, stands resolute in defense of his children, with wings opened in a spectacular display. This statue has hints of dwarven and elven workmanship as well, with golden accents and dark, beautiful eyes of polished ebony.

With religion defined, there's only a few more things. I see the government of such a city being a largely appointed city council. Centralized leadership of such a disparate group of races would be effectively impossible. The council exists as a single councilman (or councilwoman) from each race, excluding tieflings. Each district also elects by popular vote, with varying levels of voter turnout, a collection of advisers to the councilmen, serving as representatives of the vox populi. Of course this system suffers from the same issues as representative republics on Earth do. Graft, corruption, oligarchism, popularity over capability, and the like all exist in varying degrees from district to district.

Councilmen would rarely bother with a non-paragon group of adventurers. During heroic work, however, the party may be approached by a district representative for work. Dependent of the flavor of adventures the party enjoys, this can be anything from political intrigue to dungeon-delving, from thieving an item from another representative to slaying a group of orcs in the outlands. Councilmen, once the party is influential enough to even matter to them, are mostly so wrapped up in their political dramas that they rarely see outside of it. Thus they mostly lend towards carefully worded dealings with the other council members, spying, and even in extreme cases, assassination. In epic tier, the council as a whole may, somewhat forcefully, request the party's help with threats that endanger the whole of Lumina.

I believe that sums up the general feel of Lumina for the time being. A generally peaceful place with of the same underbelly that any such gathering of sapients would have.

More on the nightlands some other time.

World Building: Nightlands

There are a number of considerations with regards to this "Nightlands" setting that need to be resolved before heading much farther in.

First off, how big are the safe havens? Is Lumina a major city? If so, how does it sustain itself? Dark areas aren't really much for farming, and unless the haven is just outright huge, traditional farming won't work either. Secondly, what about trade? Does it exist? Are the nightlands so dangerous that even heavily armed trade caravans can't make it? If that's the case, do the citizens of Lumina even know there are other havens? For that matter, how dangerous ARE the nightlands? Is it possible to have a civilized area outside of a haven? If that's possible, why have people stayed inside Lumina for so long? If it's been long enough that the history of the world has been largely lost and forgotten, who would have any viable adventure leads or quests to send the party on? I'm not really going for a West Marches sort of thing, so there needs to be someone with some knowledge of the outside. What is protecting Lumina exactly? What about the other havens?

OK, so that's a bit much to cover in one post. We'll start with a few basic facts about the nightlands and go from there.

I see the nightlands as dangerous to the average commoner, even nearly suicidal for one, but for the superheroish PCs from 4e, the nightlands approach survivability. This means that though the average Lumina rank-and-file won't step outside, the city can make brief expeditions outside the haven if they have a tolerably sized military squad or hire some PC-level mercenaries. This has an effect of also allowing limited trade, but only of high-level items. There's no profit in running food from place to place, because of the protection required for the caravan, but moving magic items and the like might be worthwhile, especially given the (ridiculous) merchant markup in 4e.

So the citizens of Lumina stay in the haven because it's too dangerous outside. What makes it dangerous?

Well, there's the darkness first and foremost. Darkness has always equated to danger in human history and there's no reason to assume that would be all that different in a fantasy realm. Of course, darkvision exists for non-humans. As far as real danger goes, there are monsters. Since the area outside of havens is both dark as well as cursed, there's a reason to have evil/aberrant monsters all over. Mind you, that doesn't mean that the first-level party in their virgin adventure is going to run into Beholder Eye-Tyrants camping outside the city gates, but there should be a persistent sense of danger and the unknown in the nightlands.

I think the prevailing monster type should be undead and dire animals. Now, I haven't read 4e's monster manual all that much. I've heard that the designers sort of shied away from templates and whatnot, so making your own variant monsters (zombie wolf, for instance) is harder than before. Well screw it. Before each session, edit a few monsters from the manual to make them a starving/dying/undeadish variant. Instead of a dire wolf being a wolf that is bigger and vaguely spiky, have it missing the flesh from half of it's face, with a festering wound on it's left flank, growling low while staring at the party from it's cloudy, dead eyes. The creature abilities are the same, excluding perhaps a vulnerability to holy/radiant damage, but there's a bit of a ruined, dark flavor to the thing.

Can there be civilization outside the havens? I say yes, but only if you can use 'civilization' loosely. For that matter, we can go as far as this: Goblinoids and Orcs are humanoids that were outside the havens when the darkness fell. The ones that were able to survive were slowly changed by the cursed land, becoming orcs, goblins, bugbears, what-have-you. Note that they have no reverence for humanity, and they have no real knowledge of their origins. This information might be hard to discover for the PCs, if it were even possible. Anyway, Orcs and Gobbos are still basically evil and savage. Their skin is darker green than MM would show, as an adaptation to their environment. It's been known that the harder life is in a place, the slower technology and society develops. If there is no leisure time due to constant danger and hunger, then you rarely progress beyond hunter-gatherer groups. So that's how the orcs and goblins are. Some settlements, but mostly neolithic technology. They do have tolerable weapons, since they need them to survive. Perhaps they looted them from old ruins, and treat good weapons with a reverence that civilized peoples reserve for the gods.

So are there other havens than Lumina? Yes. But I will leave those for later. I think Lumina and the surrounding environs are more than sufficient for getting through heroic tier.

Perhaps more on this setting later today.

World Building

World Building has always been an interesting topic to me. I enjoyed Lord of the Rings for the story on some level, but the real value to me was this false world that was created. You knew, academically, that the time period/world described therein wasn't "real", in the sense of having actually existed, but it felt real. It was fleshed out enough that national relations made sense, people remembered legends without waxing pedantic about them. There were things that happened that arguably didn't relate to what the PCs were doing. The hobbits met Tom Bombadil, for instance. He existed, he seemed to be something strange and nigh-godlike, in a forest-spirit sorta way, but he didn't advance their quest. He was just there.

Campaign settings are similar as well, though with less flair. Too crunchy, and even aside from that, the plotlines are largely DM-spawned. It's rare that a DM can really form a plot, at least in my group, which doesn't either get completely destroyed by the chaotic-stupid PCs, or just doesn't have the kind of life that the campaign setting itself deserves.

Since this blog is largely an attempt to improve my DMing and playing via talking about it at length, in sort of a Rogerian style, I believe I will start a series of articles on world building, as I attempt to create a compelling setting for my next campaign.

My setting generally tend towards high-magic and all kinds of cross-planar invasions and dealings. Last time, I tried to shy away from that and make a more traditional, mundane sort of environment. Magic wasn't unknowable, by any stretch, but the party was mostly kept relatively poor compared to equivalent level for the DMG, and magic weapons were less liberally sprinkled. This worked for a while and kept the chaotic-stupid at bay. That is, until an earth elemental killed the party monk and he rerolled wizard. More on that in another post.

However, I think with this world, I will go for broke and make it a completely fantasy-based setting. Realism has it's place, and it's not in a game where the Gods grant spells on a whim and wizards fling fireballs after escaping goblins.

That is not to say that I'm throwing out simulationism, just any semblance of historical fantasy.

The "Points of Light" idea in 4e interests me in a sense. I like the idea of civilization having not spread over the lands, with huge tracts of what amounts to unexplored wilderness between them. Maybe it doesn't make sense on all levels, but that's what DM bluffing is for.

So, "Points of Light". But like I said, take that and make it high magic, fantastic, and extra adventurous. Instead of "light" in this case meaning effectively "Civilization", we'll make "light" mean "light". Millenia ago, there was some catastrophe, probably the cliché of too much power in the wrong hands, and the then-civilized world fell. The magocracy collapsed, cities fell into ruin, and a black pall spread over the land. It's not important to come up with all the details at the moment, but a thick black cloud spread across the sky and blocked the sun, shrouding most of the world in permanent night. A few wizards of astounding power managed to create safe havens. One such safe haven is where the players start.

These havens are protected by some means from the evil monsters and darkness outside, and the cloud doesn't cover them, allowing life to continue. I think this world has in the realm of perhaps a million total non-savage sapients.

I like the name "Nightlands" for the blighted lands outside the walls. Since we are going with such an on-the-nose naming scheme, we'll have the players start in the haven of "Lumina".

So to get to the setting I'm creating, I've heard that it's best to have a single line or two that defines the world. I'm having some trouble casting that into a single line, but let's see...

"A darkened, forsaken world struggles to restore itself to the light."

More on this setting later.