Our New Setting: The Impenetrable Taiga

Goodbye Bad Aachen, and hello to the Ural Mountain Range! Last time we ended our game with a TPK (total party kill) and in the discussion that followed, you all decided you wanted to keep on playing in the Russia wilderness.

Since you’re going to be developing new characters for the setting, here’s some things to consider:

1. The setting is brutal.

Like, exiled from civilization, winter’s a living hell, summer’s a bug-ridden hell, the mountains are nasty, the marshes are gooey, the woods are terrifying, and the whole region’s basically the stuff of nightmares.

Which is to say:

Characters who willingly go into such a region had better have a few points in the Bushcraft and Medicine skills, at the very least. There can be good character reasons for a lack of such skills: an exiled baron from Estonia or a fleeing courtier from Moscow probably would lack them… but most PCs in the region will have at least a little skill in these areas.

We will also definitely be using the encumbrance rules for LotFP, and I recommend you pay attention to the gear you have and may need. (Some of the mishaps of the last game session could have been avoided by the judicious use of those 50′ ropes you guys all carry around!) I’ll provide you with a sheet where you can note your gear and its locations, and track encumbrance, rations, ammo, etc.

Also note: Specialists aren’t necessarily just the LotFP version of the Thief class as found in classic D&D. The Specialist class can also be used to build a pretty good Ranger-type character (albeit with no spells), or a “Barbarian” type character with a lot of Bushcraft, climbing, and hiding skills.

Oh. and on skills: everyone can ride horses, but not everyone knows how to ride a horse into Combat. Horsemanship will be a new skill for that type of thing.

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Seclusia

In the world of our campaign, most people know that workers of magic—witches, mages, warlocks, sorcerors, conjurers: all these names are interchangeable to common folk—tend to live in special buildings infused with magic… places into which it is dangerous for mere mortals to trespass.

They are right. But in adventuring circles, a little more is known of such places.

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The Elsewhere

Here are some notes on The Elsewhere, a reality that adjoins with the world in which our campaign is played; the realities intersect, as most adventurers have reason to suspect, but your characters will probably only know hints and rumors about the following. (Still, they’ll know more than the average person.)

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Weird Europe

Your characters’ Europe is not our Europe. It’s… worse. I mean, Europe wasn’t a particularly fun place to be in the 168os: religious strife, horrible and persistent disease outbreaks, religious intolerance, plenty of mercenary and criminal activity, religious and social repression, the rising pressures of colonial expansion and of the growth of mercantile capitalism, and much more.

Wait, that’s our Europe.

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Home Base? Bad Aachen

Though your characters are free to roam the world—and I’ve made a big effort to make the PC races be non-specific to Western cultures—we’ll be starting off the campaign somewhere in Europe, specifically at Bad Aachen, a hot springs resort town-turned-Early Modern “Babylon North” near the border between what’s now Germany and Belgium.

That’s just an easy jumping-off point, though, and while there’s plenty of adventure hooks in the area, including the setting of the playtest adventure we’ll be trying for our first meetup, it’s not like your characters are chained up there. (At least not yet!)

Which is to say, if you folks feel eager to have your characters wander off to parts unknown? All the better… and I have some ideas about places where fruitful adventures might be had. (See A Little Weird World Geography for some hints about those locales.) Here’s some info about the general area.

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The World as Your Characters Know It

If you’ve played some flavor of D&D before, you probably have a specific idea of how a standard campaign world works, and how the rules function within it. That’s a good thing: it means most of the mechanics of this game will be familiar and comfortable for you. However, I’m trying something a little different, because I want a fresh angle on this game we all know and love. Using the Lamentations of the Flame Princess system is one part of that, but I’m going a couple of steps further.

I’ll try sketch out the world for you in several posts; if I do it right, I think it’ll answer any questions you might have about why the standard demihuman races (elf, dwarf, halfling, gnome, half-orc) aren’t available for play, while weird subraces like the Changeling and the Dagonian are, as well as what to expect while adventuring in this world, and how it differs from regular old D&D.

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