Monday, February 1, 2016

Aldsburg Chronicles Rewritten

... wherein the Previous and Current rejoin ...

The Aldsburg Chronicles, even while set after the previous campaign, had been running on and off for a year or so.  The end of the Worldgod Campaign was pretty intense and went down one of the paths that the Aldsburg Chronicles were NOT set in.  So we rebooted a bit.



The end of the 8th Age was a time of great destruction.  When the Phoenician Lords, a band of madmen from another world, killed the Soul of the Eradu the skies bled metal and fire.  Waters rose and swallowed the unworthy.  Mountains punched though the ground and tumbled the weak.  Those that survived the Apocalypse saw a new sky brimming with gods and felt the world shudder as it forced itself to be reborn.

Aldsburg is the City of Towers.  It was once a place that sprawled and was home to millions.  But now only 3 towers stand tall: Lion's Tooth, Ivory Jundar, and Steel Tower.  The ruins of other towers are scattered across the scarred mountainside and inhabited by the wretched - bandits, mutants, and monsters.

Lion's Tooth is the gateway to Aldsburg and where the majority of Aldsburg lives.  Each of the layers has one of the noble families that runs it, and each layer has 2 or three townships run by lesser nobility.
Somewhere in the crown sits Clarissa the Grotesque who controls all of the Tower.  The lowest to highest layers are: the Warrens, Bridgingate, and The Crown.

Ivory Jundar is where the Opulent and Noble live.  The four levels are places of slavery and dark desires.  While the Bellmans Quarter the lowest tower level) is entirely off limits, activity between Lion's Tooth and Steel Tower take place in The Arena level.  The strange Twin Spires layer has two very distinct and separate regions split when the sky fell, but The Clouds are the highest level and allow the most opulent and most worthy.

Steel Tower was once a place of Wizards but was burned from the core outward.  It is now a place where the truly criminal and the insane are left to their own devices.  While none are allowed to leave the Steel Tower does trade and have interaction with both Ivory and Lion's Tooth. The five levels are named after the colors of the stone and steel: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue.


Surrounding The Towers are two communities: Callistown and Brindle's Gate.  The inhabitants of Callistown are farmers and miners and make the majority of the food for the city.  They live in what appears to be and endless and smoking shanty around the base of Lion's Tooth.  Brindle's Gate is on the far side of Hangman Bridge and acts as a gate town for those few visitors that attempt to visit.  It is a place of thievery and corruption.



The players asked a few questions but were all bought in.  With the memories of the previous Aldsburg games rumbling about the setting already feels solid.  Also, this happens to mesh up nicely with the Haven Campaign setting for the BXDH rules.

Now Aldsburg is more focused (3 towers instead of a billion) and is surrounded by both alternate urban locations but immediate "Giant Ruined Pile" sites.  The party can muck about in the immediate area as much as they like or get into some of wilderness exploration.

From the GM side I'm going to look into making point-crawl style maps for the area around Aldsburg.  Then a combination of hex-crawl and point-crawl for the wilderness.  Aldsburg and the Underworld get the old fashioned grid map treatment.

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