Datum by Datum

The following is a bit of story from my homebrew campaign of Tharstradt. Linus Redmond. A man destined for great things. Destined to be a sorcerer in the time of the Dreadmancers of West Flach and the Fourth Highland Dynasty. Surrounded by politics fueled by magics, Linus had to be, and was, the kind of tactician to use those same magics to make powerful and subtle ritual curses on his political enemies. Nothing illegal of course, at least not that anybody knew about. The laws of West Flach and the Vaubrich Academy are old enough to have dealt with the issues of white, grey, and black magic of course. In the end all magic ends up a bit grey, but in the eyes of the law and of the state what really matters is what kinds of spells are allowed to be used in society. Once Linus reached the peak of his power, scrutiny was much more a tool for him to use rather than something to worry about, but until then he had to be cunning in his plots if he was to succeed. It was 966 and...

I've been thinking about making quests and supplemental material for Tharstradt, my fantasy campaign run with slightly modified Savage Worlds mechanics. So I thought I'd write some stories and backstory here. It was 990 in Tharstradt. Quite early in the year, frost was still covering much of the plains of East Flach, a southern province isolated by the Nenalta and Saltshimmer rivers from the rest of Tharstradt. Benjamin Worldhorse and Graham Cedenach were on their way to the nearest Great Road station, two more days to go on foot. Ben had pasty white skin, was of middling height and slight build. Graham was an obvious immigrant to East Flach with birch colored skin, standing absurdly tall for anyone in the Flachlands at 6'10". The two of them were carrying tokens granting democratic rights to each of them called Seals of Citizenship. Their town of Gilurhall had pooled resources together and constructed each seal to the exacting specifications codified in the laws of ...

Designing a setting for a campaign is a rather daunting task. You can take several approaches to this, with one end of the spectrum being insanely detailed to the point of ecological information being established and the other end just being a typical fantasy world that transplants existing setting rules. I went with the former, because I don't know how to pick tasks that are of a reasonable scope. Using the Savage Worlds system, one of the worlds that I came up with for an RPG campaign that I ran was a small-ish continent in a world of haphazard magic along various ley lines. The premise was that people from Earth were reborn in this place with no memory of their prior life. As time went on their memories slowly returned and as the ages progressed eventually every life that came to Tharstradt was through a newborn that inherited memories instead of being born as an adult in a mysterious shrine towards the center of the continent. Understandably, it can be very hard to get a fe...