Prepping The Frontiers of Qith

I'm alive and well!



Life is full of seasons, and my latest season has been dominated by work. Things are beginning to return to normal and my itch to run a game has started anew. I am lucky enough to have successfully passed the DM reigns to one of my players, and those players are having their 5e needs met I am looking to explore a bit. Inspired by Jeffro Johnson's 1:1 game time experiments I am looking to run an OSE game using the controversial time conventions with a West Marches style approach.



I am in no rush to begin, instead, taking my time to gather my thoughts and design the backdrop of a world for the players to breathe life into. Turning shower thoughts and drivetime distractions into a solid piece of gameable lore is a bit of a guilty pleasure so I hope you don't mind if I take my time indulging in it and bringing you along for the ride.



The first bits of inspiration come from an abandoned trail of thought to create a smaller setting based on my homelands in the Appalachians. I highly doubt I could do it any better than Erik Jensen did with his not-dissimilar Lumberlands. While this is an idea I may return to in the future, the idea of a lodge in which the throng of adventurers would meet and exchange tales and rumors while carousing and forming parties to explore the area was too good to pass up. While I haven't quite come up with a cool name for such a lodge, I do plan on it being the centerpiece of this campaign. 



But why would there be a lodge? My idea is for it to be some remote outpost, a hub of activity for the players. Not some silly tavern or inn named after a color and an animal, that's where the weekend warriors go. You know the type, the folks that would rather sit around and get drunk exchanging tales of adventures they have dreamt of having rather going out and getting their hands dirty. No. the people who spend their time at the lodge would surely look down on these white-collar braggarts. 



The lodge needs to be a beacon in an untamed wilderness. A... frontier. "Wait, I have a blog about frontiers," So it seems a perfect fit to place the lodge in the Frontiers of Qith. But why is the continent of Qith a frontier? I imagine it as a place the Qith the Conqueror discovered long ago, but why would he leave it behind? Was it cursed? Were its inhabitants too wild for even Qith to conquer? No... That would be lame. What if it was like a prison colony? Well, I guess that could work, but I'm not in love with it. What if it was the site of an apocalyptic event where gods waged war leaving the lands inhospitable except for the hardiest of adventurers and the mutated creatures that were spawned when the gods war flung the planet into the far-realms? 



Okay I think that tracks.

What if Qith quickly realized what this strange land was and quickly monetized it by creating an armada of prison ships to transport the criminals of the main continent to Qith for fun and profit? Yeah, that sounds like something he would do. Qith is a rascal like that sometimes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Regulators: Wildemount Up

Prepping the Frontiers of Qith 2