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ThesisThe setting grew out of a desire to create a rich campaign setting where the players have a range of goals, allies, and enemies as rich as in the real world, and where alignment goes beyond lawful/chaotic and good/evil into shades of grey. The scenario is one where a current peace is generally benevolent but is the somewhat uneasy result of cultural invasion that ended an aged culture; and where the classic fantasy trope of the "growing darkness" is of a further pending invasion by truly alien creatures that claim an original, nearly religious, right to the land. I'm hesitant to get into how much this was affected by the trip that I took to Israel and Palestine shortly before we began play. In Correllendor, nearly everyone is right if you look closely enough. Partisans of the old religion fight the erosion of their beliefs and the encroachment into their wilderness. The culture that inherited the land from them after years of bondage under an advanced and alien race were themselves shuffled off into the corners of 'their' land, in turn, by the currently dominant people. The current monarchy itself faces invasion by the long-lost alien races, and looks at the tools at hand-- oppression, conscription, and war or collaboration, compromise, and treaty. And around and between each of those are the others, the halfling delwen, the centaur-like bariaur, the orcs, and the goblins. To add to that, I wanted to give the players an unusual amount of freedom and leadership in the story. I decided to set the likely timeline of the plot, but then to let the players chart their course within that-- hopefully they would avert outright war, but whether they chose to do that by aligning themselves with the government or by trying to hide (or help) the 'invasion' entirely would be up to them. They could decide that the invaders were gods or demons or regular people and the show would go on, their alignment would remain. The 'evil' they fought would be the extremists and those that were looking to their own well-being at the expense of all others. For the geography, I revised a previously-ignored kingdom on the west coast, which stood neatly between a great ocean and some intriguingly remote and unexplored mountain valleys. From there, it was on to the opening details: the races, religions, and classes for the players to choose from. |