The long road (scenario)
“The characters are journeying, trying to reach the fabled Capital. They must brave a broken land, a deadly swamp, a long bridge, and a steep cliff. ”
I’m writing a huge-ass adventure, it’s again a reference to something I played a long time ago that has led me down the path to making this game. The scenario is about a caravan of characters travelling to Tsarigrad and encountering a lot of nonsense on the way. Read all about it!
The broken land (Own work, marker, gouache, 2023).
UPDATE: the blog is changing from weekly to once or twice a month. It wasn’t something I originally wanted to do but with the amount of work this project is turning out to be in combination with other obligations, means that once in two or so weeks results in higher quality content.
Today I want to share the first leg of this long and excruciating journey - the broken land. It’s a large plateau with invisible walls all around it but inside there’s a lot of gameplay material and potentially choices to be made. It’s my own blend of arbitrarily framing the scenario in a non-democratic and railroad-y way to set a specific situation, but within that broad context there is a lot of freedom and chaos and no one knows how things will turn out in the end. There is a map provided above and you can see that there is so much about it that’s stylized that it clearly isn’t a realistic depiction of real space. My apologies for the terrible image quality, if it ends up included in the book it will be a proper scan and not just an edited photo.
This framing begins with the group ascending a large staircase and arriving at a Roman gate which arches over a pile of round stones and a bronze colossus in the shape of a woman. Each character is burdened with one of these stones and must carry them to the other side of the plateau to the brother of the colossus, lest it hunt them down and beat them into a mush as is ancient custom. These stones are cumbersome (C), and a character may only ever carry two such items, so this is a big ask. In my game fantastic entities act out a logic that is not human and seems very alien, threatening, and consistent in the worst way possible. This sometimes leaves them wide open for exploitation, but keeps them mystical and fantastical. With that, the characters may enter the plateau proper, that has five distinct locations. To get to the other side, the group has to visit at least three of these, but may visit them all if they would like. Notice how nonsensical and gamey this is, and also how it sets the tone of ‘oh, we’re playing a game and it’s totally fine to have limitations like this because we are here to be silly and do cool things that would never happen irl‘.
Anyway, the locations are as follows:
THE DEAD VILLAGES, a collection of pathetic settlements that are experiencing hard times after the rise of a local tyrant - Peshkir-Agha and their ‘wolves of dust’.
TOWER OF DUST, at its top there is an anvil with a green sabre embedded in it. A river flows from the anvil and a hawk protects the blade, only allowing a proper or aspiring hero to pull it out (it’s a powerful magic item).
THE LONG FLAT, the main part of the plateau with sparse vegetation and big rocks breaking up the landscape. A tribe of giants lives somewhere here, sharing the ecosystem with overgrown short-fleeced sheep. They are dangerous and stupid.
CITY OF CLAY, an abandoned city where a bee-worm has eaten all of the residents and inhabited the treasury. It is actually a large lizard with black and yellow stripes, an ambush predator and very scary!
DEVILTEETH, there was once a hill here, but now only pillars of stone remain. There are many legends and tales about how this happened but now a demon lives here. Palaemon is an artistic spirit and fanatically paints images onto the natural formations. The villagers hate him.
There is a list of random encounters, all of these come with a description, a purpose, and stats:
People of the dead villages.
Wolves of the sand.
Old-timey group of knights.
Emissary from Tsarigrad.
Giant from the flat.
The bee-worm.
On the other side of the plateau there is another Roman gate and another colossus. This one accepts the stones brought by the players but scolds his sister for being to uptight and beholden to tradition, expressing that he doesn’t actually care they brought these stones all the way here. A staircase leads down into the swamp, which is the next area to be explored, probably in a very similar way.
A lot of details are omitted here, this is kind of the skeleton of this part of the adventure, I’m saving all the juicy bits for the book. Just for example, each location is more fleshed out in my notes, there’s more to discover and see, and it’s way closer to what you need to just run it straight from the page with some improv. I still wanted to share it as I think these scenarios are very enjoyable for me to make and that they are what communicates my intent the most. This is where I get to actually create content that will hopefully one day serve to generate cool stories around a table and I find that much more interesting than rulesets.
Thank you for reading and catch you in two weeks!
