Campaign Pitches

The four player-facing campaign choices for the Saturday table.

Icebeach: The Wyrmroads of Himmelsrand
The Kingdom of Nwt: The Azure Return
Fearledell: The Chains Beneath the Lake
Farnears: The Harvest Crown

Icebeach: The Wyrmroads of Himmelsrand

Winter is broken; the old road wakes.

The Endless Winter is ended, yet the thaw has proved no gentler master: roads founder, barrows open, and a young white dragon hunts from settlement to settlement as though some greater terror drives it south. A vanished scholar and a plundered excavation draw the characters beneath Icebeach, where a buried giant way-station preserves the broken articles of an ancient compact between mortals and wyrms. Beyond those halls, the ruined roads run north into Himmelsrand, where priests, princes, and desperate common folk gather beneath the sign of a crown with wings. The friends made in mean taverns and snowbound hamlets shall decide whether the north gains a guardian, submits to a dragon sovereign, or burns in the war between them.

Choose this if: You want local northern heroism that grows into dragon diplomacy and factional sovereignty.

Tone and Themes

This is a saga of recovery written upon a hard, inhabited frontier--not another tale in which an everlasting winter must be slain. The sun has returned, but the thaw exposes graves, collapses familiar routes, and tempts outsiders toward treasures Icebeach endured long enough to forget. Early play should be intimate and practical: missing fishers, poisoned wells, hungry beasts, failed ferries, disputed dig-sites, and one dragon whose shadow can turn any journey awry.

The widening tale concerns security and sovereignty. What will frightened communities surrender for protection, and what distinction remains between a guardian who demands obedience and a tyrant who keeps monsters from the door? The register should mingle hearth-smoke and immensity: maple cakes, patched wool, salt fish, mine lamps, and council gossip belong beside cyclopean mile-stones, sepulchral roads, dragon heraldry, and peaks lost above the cloud.

Foundations

Icebeach is a small northern confederation governed through councils and settlement delegates rather than a centralized crown.
The Endless Winter ended in 71 BEC with Morena's defeat. Its sequence remains incomplete, but its ending and regional aftermath are established.
The country survives by fishing, sheep, winter crops, herbs, maple products, limited mining, and mutual aid. Boats bear most trade because overland roads are poor or ruined.
Giant-era roads and ruins already cross Icebeach. The proposed Wyrmroads are those works after later use, alteration, or appropriation by dragons.
Windrich's fortress, undead experiments, divine terror, and contested memory remain historical scars, not the central villainy reborn.
Castgate's gemstone workings and Athenaeum presence provide a starting nexus for miners, scholars, councils, foreign agents, and rival excavations.
The dragon movement succeeds because its promise is credible. Some followers seek a guardian bound by oath, some an ancient compact, some an absolute monarch, and some control over whichever dragon receives the crown.
The dragons remain persons with incompatible desires. The roaming white dragon may be marauder, refugee, claimant, witness, or some troublesome mixture of all four.

Player Principles

Give your character a person, household, crew, clan, school, or settlement in Icebeach whose fate matters to them.
Arrive with a reason to brave the roads rather than wait safely beside the fire.
Treat small acts of aid as the foundation of later authority; the fisher rescued in the opening may speak for a town when armies gather.
Regard ruins as the remains of somebody's history, even when treasure lies within.
Hold an opinion about dragons, foreign scholars, and northern unity, but leave each open to injury and revision.
Be willing to bargain with foes, investigate patrons, and question instructions whose legality exceeds their wisdom.

Character Origins and Roles

Characters might be cold-water fishers, whalers, shepherds, maple tenders, gemstone miners, reindeer drovers, wandering skalds, council runners, wilderness guides, goliath seekers, caravan guards, rescuers, prospectors, or survivors raised beneath the memory of the Endless Winter. Outsiders might be junior Athenaeum scholars, hired excavators, bounty-takers pursuing a renegade academic, merchants stranded by failed transport, treaty envoys, or agents sent to observe a rival dig and now doubtful of their orders.

Useful places within the company include guide, hunter, interpreter, chronicler, negotiator, delver, healer, quartermaster, and keeper of local promises. At least one character should know the starting settlement intimately, while another possesses a credible reason to ask dangerous questions about the buried past.

Collaborative Map Seeds

The starting settlement: what warmth, craft, or communal custom makes it beloved, and what scar of the Endless Winter can no mason repair?
The white dragon's first refuge: an abandoned watchtower, stranded ship, shattered giant monument, or peak older hunters refuse to name.
A giant road newly exposed by the thaw: where does it run, and why did local tradition forbid clearing its stones?
The rival excavation near Castgate's gem country: who finances it, what lie appears upon its charter, and which worker has vanished?
The buried way-station: what sign proves people lived below long after the road was abandoned?
A hamlet ready to welcome the dragon movement because every distant government failed it during the Winter.
The northern pass into Himmelsrand: what tribute, oath, or terrible courtesy does an old marker demand?

Session-Zero Questions

Which Icebeach community claims you as one of its own, and what duty have you neglected there?
Who kept your family alive during the Endless Winter, and what unpayable debt remains?
What did you lose when the winter ended rather than when it began?
What tale about dragons did you believe as a child, and who taught it to you?
Which outsider institution has earned your trust or lasting suspicion?
What forbidden ruin have locals warned you never to enter, and why do you believe the warning conceals a lie?
If a dragon could truly keep the north safe, what price would make its protection intolerable?

Inciting Incident

At the first open-air Maple Faire since the roads began to thaw, a half-dead excavation team staggers into the starting settlement with a slab of blue-black stone lashed upon a broken sledge. Its face bears two inscriptions laid one atop the other: giant road-marks cut deep, and a later oath etched by talons. Before the council can decide whether the relic is treasure, treaty, or stolen grave-goods, a young white dragon descends through the festival smoke--not to gorge upon sheep or townsfolk, but to tear the stone from its bindings.

The attack breaks an ancient culvert beneath the square. Children, traders, and half the winter stores plunge into a stairway no living map records, while scarred hunters wearing new-made dragon badges close upon the fleeing wyrm from the north. By nightfall one excavator is missing, the dragon has carried away only half the sundered stone, and the opened stair breathes warm air from a road buried since the age of giants.

Campaign Shape

The Dragon on the Road

The opening adventures concern local jobs, approximately levels 1-2: rescuing travelers, reopening a ferry, clearing displaced monsters, guarding mine crews, and learning why the white dragon came south. Relationships forged here become political capital later.

The Settlement Below

Approximately levels 2-5, a missing scholar and stolen route-tablet lead through bandits, claim-jumpers, rival agents, and sealed galleries into the buried way-station. The shattered-object mystery concerns a broken covenant or instrument of draconic recognition whose routes continue beyond Icebeach.

The Councils of Icebeach

Approximately levels 5-8, the company travels the confederation along revived Wyrmroads. Each settlement must choose among its own defenses, foreign aid, a northern alliance, or an oath beneath dragon wings.

The Crowned North

Approximately levels 9-13, the characters cross into Himmelsrand amid pilgrimage, factional war, and draconic diplomacy. They may destroy the claim, bind a guardian beneath mortal law, support a dragon ruler, expose a manufactured history, or forge a compact without sovereign wings.

The Kingdom of Nwt: The Azure Return

The storm remembers her name; the living must decide what it means.

Across Nwt, the dead speak the name of the Azure Sovereign when thunder rolls, while blue lightning reveals portions of a royal road erased after the conquest. From Caerulean and jungle-girt Darwishi, loyalists, republicans, foreign antiquarians, Beccin agents, and common tomb-thieves race toward the Lost Caverns, each bearing a different account of the dragon-queen whom older chronicles call Nut. Every ruin yields some fragment of her reign--law, atrocity, protection, tribute, learning, or rebellion--and some power by which she might be restored, recreated, or replaced. The characters must survive the road and enter the queen's deathless hoard, there to determine who may inherit Nwt's bones, treasures, history, and crown.

Choose this if: You want dangerous exploration, contested history, and a final decision about what a nation should resurrect.

Tone and Themes

This is an expedition tale of hot rain, blue thunder, ruined observatories, jealous guides, rival camps, and subterranean immensities where the dead queen's wards yet retain their malice. Its surface possesses the vigor of old adventure--lost roads, monstrous rivers, maps bought with blood, and treasure beyond sober reckoning--but every recovered object returns to a living political world. A crown is not merely gold; it is evidence. A decree may be both legal foundation and record of dispossession.

The great themes are memory after conquest, ownership of the dead, archaeology as political power, the difference between restoration and freedom, and whether a nation may honor what a ruler protected without reviving what she ruled. Nwt must never reduce to saint, monster, or alignment entry. Contradictory truths may all be true of a sovereign who ruled long enough.

Foundations

Nwt was a dragon-ruled realm in Astrousia. Beccin killed its sovereign, razed the palace, and left the country as an autonomous colony or territory under continuing influence.
Loyalty survives, but communities need not agree upon monarchy, restoration, independence, accommodation, federalism, or departure.
The Azure Sovereign is associated with Caerulean, storms, wisdom, protection, desert winds, magical learning, and formidable authority.
The Stormwardens served as clergy, administrators, educators, warriors, scholars, and keepers of civic knowledge. Their surviving branches may disagree about what duty continues after their patron's death.
The queen's children were taken into hiding. Their identities, wishes, and political significance remain open.
Most treasure in the razed palace reportedly remained. Treasure may include public records, ritual regalia, war spoils, ancestral goods, and objects claimed from conquered peoples.
An archived adventure places the Lost Caverns near Caerulean: a defended dragon lair of lesser and greater depths, haunted by monsters, devils, failed expeditions, and an unsurpassed hoard.

Player Principles

Possess reason both to undertake the expedition and to care what happens when its discoveries return home.
A Nwt character need not be a loyalist; a foreign character must possess more than an appetite for unclaimed gold.
Name one community, household, institution, or dead person whose stake in the ruins you recognize.
Choose one belief about Nwt you hold fiercely, one fact that might change it, and one treasure you have promised not to treat as plunder.
Disagreement concerning the queen is welcome, but characters must be capable of hearing evidence and reaching decisions together.

Character Origins and Roles

Suitable origins include Nwt memory-bearers, former royal households, Stormwarden descendants, republican organizers, Caerulean archivists, Darwishi guides, caravaners, custodians of hidden dragon-children, Beccin veterans or deserters, Athenaeum antiquarians, foreign treasure-seekers, displaced villagers, tomb robbers seeking restitution, or heirs to households stripped of ancestral goods.

Useful expeditionary roles include guide, quartermaster, chronicler, interpreter, envoy, physician, scout, beast-keeper, delver, ward-breaker, and protector of recovered objects. The company should possess practical means to travel, negotiate, interpret, and survive below ground.

Collaborative Map Seeds

Caerulean: what part still bears the queen's grandeur, and what part was rebuilt deliberately without her image?
The razed palace: which chamber escaped Beccin destruction, and who now claims lawful custody of it?
Darwishi: which guild or council controls the hiring of guides, and what relic may not legally leave its gates?
The lost royal road: what weather reveals its stones, and whose villages were compelled to maintain it?
A roadside sanctuary: which community remembers Nwt as protector, tyrant, or both?
The hidden children's refuge: what natural wonder conceals it, and what betrayal makes its keepers distrust every claimant?
The Lost Caverns: what warning stands at the entrance, and which later hand altered its meaning?

Session-Zero Questions

What name or title did your household use for the Azure Sovereign, and which name was forbidden?
What did Beccin's conquest take from your family or place within its keeping?
Which deed attributed to Nwt do you wish to prove--or disprove?
What object in the royal hoard belongs, by your reckoning, to someone other than the crown?
Which member of a rival expedition was once your companion, teacher, lover, jailer, or betrayer?
Which fellow character first showed you evidence that complicated your beliefs about the queen?
What would Nwt's return mean for you personally, apart from the kingdom's fate?

Inciting Incident

At noon beneath an empty sky, Caerulean holds funeral rites for a keeper of the old palace records. The bier passes between toppled dragon columns while officials, Stormwardens, Beccin observers, and common mourners watch one another more closely than they watch the dead. Then blue lightning strikes every ruined column at once.

The corpse sits upright. From the palace necropolis answer a hundred dead voices, yet they do not speak one message. Some cry, "Crown me." Others plead, "Keep me dead." A third chorus whispers, "They are making another." Lightning burns upon the plaza a map of the lost royal road, marking seven sites before vanishing into the mountains. Before silence returns, masked claimants seize the dead archivist's sealed case and flee through the rain.

Campaign Shape

The Many Voices

Investigate the necropolis, recover or copy the stolen records, meet competing sponsors, and decide under whose authority--if anyone's--the company travels.

The Royal Road

Cross Astrousia through river valleys, jungle margins, storm-cut uplands, and living communities bound unequally to the former realm. Each major site yields evidence and one material element sought by restorationists.

The War of Expeditions

Rival companies converge as discoveries alter politics in Caerulean. Sponsors split, guides defect, roads close, and foreign powers demand access. The party decides what to publish, conceal, return, trade, or carry onward.

The Lost Caverns

The lesser depths are an old-school underworld of deceptive guardians, subterranean rivers, failed treasure-seekers, and surviving defenses. The greater depths contain the sovereign heart of the hoard and several incompatible means of producing something that might be called Nwt.

The Azure Judgment

The company may restore the queen, awaken a reconstruction, crown an heir, transfer sacred authority into a civic institution, disperse the hoard, preserve the tomb, or ensure no sovereign wields its power again.

Fearledell: The Chains Beneath the Lake

At Candlelight the lanterns blacken, and winter falls into Hell.

On the Festival of Candlelight, the folk of Fearledell send ten thousand lanterns aloft in memory of those slain by the Seelie. This year every flame gutters black, chains vast as towers burst from beneath the frozen lake, and the island capital is dragged bodily into Hell--where its snow begins freezing battlefields which have never known winter. Trapped beside King Einare, the hedge-witches, and a city succumbing to terror, the characters must hold the streets, discover what ancient power abides in the royal blood, and treat with infernal powers which each claim lawful dominion over the fallen kingdom. They may ransom their home, unmake the claim that drew it below, or forge from the doomed city a realm no power of Hell can command.

Choose this if: You want immediate catastrophe, infernal bargains, besieged-city survival, and an extravagant planar rescue.

Tone and Themes

Begin with candlelit pageantry and turn it, in a single dreadful stroke, into wintry siege fantasy. The capital remains a living community rather than a disposable ruin: skaters become couriers, vintners ration cellars, lantern-makers fashion signals, and old knights again stand beside mistrusted hedge-witches. Beyond the walls lies a Hell divided by rank, conquest, and incompatible law, where every promised rescue bears a carefully omitted price.

The themes are duty to home, inherited power, remembrance transformed into obligation, and whether salvation purchased through another's bondage deserves the name. Winter is both salvation and peril: it quenches infernal fire and preserves stores, yet cracks stone, kills crops, and makes the city a prize worth possessing.

Foundations

Fearledell is a snowy, mountainous kingdom whose island capital stands in Fearledell Lake. Orchards, vineyards, swineherds, winter sports, and liquor trade furnish a homely civilization worth rescuing.
King Marron died during a Seelie incursion. Einare, aided by hedge-witches, repelled the invaders and afterward gained standing invitation to the winter elves' court.
The Festival of Candlelight commemorates those losses through paper lanterns sent into the sky.
Circle Rock Port is the kingdom's sole major harbor and becomes the gathering place for those left behind.
The royal line is rumored to bear an ancient gift of winter. Whether it is blessing, covenant, weapon, prison, or inheritance remains discoverable through play.
Wyss became ruler of Hell's first layer after killing the Cave Mother in 75 BEC. Lilith is separately recorded as Queen over Hell; their relationship is unsettled and appears through rival claims, agents, and contradictory law.
The winter power is not secretly evil. It is something Hell covets and something frightened mortals may misuse.

Player Principles

Possess something within the capital you will not readily abandon: a household, guild, neighborhood, rival, shrine, or duty.
You need not love the monarchy, but you must care what becomes of Fearledell.
Be willing to enter dangerous negotiations without being compelled to accept any particular bargain.
Let private debts and divided allegiances sharpen collective decisions rather than dissolve the company.
Name what you refuse to surrender even if it becomes the certain price of taking the city home.

Character Origins and Roles

Suitable origins include capital skaters, artisans, guards, courtiers, vintners, royal servants, hedge-witches' pupils, veterans of the Seelie incursion, winter-elf envoys, Circle Rock sailors caught in the city for the festival, foreign pilgrims, and scholars of infernal covenants. Useful company roles include rescuer, scout, negotiator, chronicler, occult examiner, defender of common folk, keeper of stores, and breaker of chains. A character tied to Einare's bloodline may be included, but the campaign requires no solitary chosen heir.

Collaborative Map Seeds

The island capital: which district is celebrated throughout Fearledell, and what ugly truth lies beneath its beauty?
The Candlelight Way: where are the names of Marron and the Seelie dead kept, and whose name was removed?
The frozen lake: what structure can be glimpsed beneath its oldest ice, directly below the royal seat?
The hedge-witches' refuge: what common service made them beloved, and what royal prohibition still binds them?
Circle Rock Port: who gathers there to mount a rescue, and who prospers while the capital is absent?
The winter-elven road: where does its threshold appear, and what courtesy must no mortal violate?
The infernal shore: what familiar landmark arrived twisted beside the city, and whose seal appears upon the nearest chain?

Session-Zero Questions

Whom did your household lose during the Seelie incursion?
What duty do you perform during the Festival of Candlelight?
What does King Einare--or the crown--owe your family?
Which hedge-witch once aided you, and why are you ashamed to admit it?
What place in the island capital would you sacrifice yourself to preserve?
What bargain, crime, or inheritance has already caused Hell to know your name?
What would you refuse to surrender even if it were the certain price of taking Fearledell home?

Inciting Incident

The skaters cease upon the sounding of the royal bell. Above them, ten thousand paper lanterns rise through gentle snow, each bearing the name of one whom Fearledell remembers. The first lantern blackens above the palace; then another, and another, until the heavens are crowded with dead stars.

A blow shakes the lake from beneath. Iron links broader than houses burst through the ice without spilling water, coil about the island walls, and draw taut beneath an unseen hand. The lantern flames burn downward; the mountains vanish behind curtains of steam; and, amid the deep tolling of bells no mortal forged, the whole capital is torn from Hiraeth.

When the convulsion ends, a brazen sky hangs above Fearledell. Infernal hosts gather beyond the frozen shore, yet snow continues to fall, smothering their fires beneath clean white silence. Upon the nearest chain stand two seals: one ancient and crowned with a serpent, the other newly struck over an older name.

Campaign Shape

The Black Candle

Survive the descent, rescue trapped districts, establish order, and learn why the lake's chains recognize the royal household.

The Kingdom Below

Defend the island against raiders and claimants while food, fuel, legitimacy, and public trust dwindle. Explore the frozen margins where Fearledell's winter remakes Hell.

The Courts of Ash and Rime

Seek passage, allies, and proof among Wyss's new dominion, Lilith's older hierarchy, winter-elven emissaries, rebellious fiends, and mortals bound by forgotten covenants.

The Severing

Decide what must be surrendered to raise the city. The characters might free Fearledell, transfer the claim, extinguish the royal winter, depose its bearer, bargain with one throne against another, or keep the city below as an armed sanctuary.

Farnears: The Harvest Crown

The king lies cold; the fields shall choose.

King Stephen lies beneath Willowhallow, his heir is nine, and Viceroy Alistair's writ now rides with armed grain-takers. The crown's hard-won peace splinters among freeholds that remember older liberties, while hungry neighbors reckon the worth of every mill, bridge, and bushel. From a battered keep at the crossroads, the characters must bind quarrelsome communities by promise, favor, steel, and common necessity--for every oath wins a banner and incurs a debt. When the child comes of age, Farnears must become a kingdom restored, a compact of free peoples, a realm of the characters' own devising, or carrion for the powers gathered at its borders.

Choose this if: You want realm-building, negotiation, logistics, and a political order authored by promises made in play.

Tone and Themes

This is agrarian statecraft with mud upon its boots: winter grain, broken millstones, flooded roads, inheritance, hospitality, and armed riders carrying dubious seals. It is Kingmaker inverted. The map is not empty, the communities are not waiting to be claimed, and expansion means persuading people with laws, guarantees, marriages, pardons, roads, and protection.

Its themes are consent to rule, promises as public architecture, material foundations of power, resistance to distant authority, and the difference between unifying a people and possessing them. Political rivals should hold defensible aims; removing Alistair never settles the larger question of who may rule.

Foundations

Farnears is Fair's breadbasket, historically a loose and unruly confederation of farmers and communities.
It rebelled against RossWin over elven taxation and remains resistant to distant rule.
King Stephen's recent line brought unusual peace and prosperity; his death, nine-year-old heir, and Alistair's radical measures come from archived Lost Thrown material.
The proposed reconciliation is that the monarchy is a recent crown laid over older freehold customs. Stephen governed successfully because communities consented to his compact; Alistair mistakes consent for submission.
Attergo may serve as southern capital or principal port, but that status remains suggested rather than settled.
The battered crossroads keep, negotiated terms of accession, and the characters' emerging compact are campaign proposals.
Farnears is full of old works beneath productive land; ruins matter because living communities farm above them.

Player Principles

Owe something to a Farnears community, household, institution, or person.
Hold an opinion about the crown, but leave room for events to alter it.
Treat public promises as consequential.
Seek allies among ordinary people as readily as among titled houses.
Accept that protecting one settlement may imperil another.
Be willing to govern, delegate, negotiate, and answer for what is done in your name.

Character Origins and Roles

Characters might be freeholders' children, millers, drovers, hedge-priests, itinerant judges, royal retainers, discharged soldiers, Attergo factors, RossWin cooperative envoys, tutors or guards once attached to the heir, or descendants of families who fought the old tax rebellion. Useful functions include emissary, scout, quartermaster, chronicler, protector, legal advocate, builder, and keeper of the company's promises. No character need begin as a ruler, but all should care what Farnears becomes.

Collaborative Map Seeds

The damaged keep entrusted to the party: who built it, and why was it abandoned?
A freehold that loved Stephen but will never kneel to another Willowhallow.
A mill or river crossing upon which three hostile communities depend.
An elder ruin beneath productive fields, said to predate much of Pythia.
The RossWin border road where the old tax rebellion began.
Attergo's granaries and docks, through which merchants may feed--or throttle--the realm.
A village Alistair's reforms genuinely saved, making it fiercely loyal to him.

Session-Zero Questions

What promise made by Stephen bound your household to his crown?
Which decree of Alistair's crossed a line you cannot forgive?
What does your character privately fear the young heir might become?
Which freehold has a rightful grievance against you or your family?
What ancient liberty do the people invoke when rulers overreach?
Who fed you during a lean winter, and what debt remains unpaid?
If offered a crown, what would compel you to accept--or refuse--it?

Inciting Incident

At the autumn tithe-moot of the crossroads keep, Alistair's reeve arrives with soldiers and an order seizing the district's seed grain "for the preservation of the realm." A mud-spattered royal courier follows bearing a countermand allegedly dictated by the child heir; before either seal can be tested, hooded riders fire the granary, murder the courier, and attempt to carry off the moot's elected speaker.

The characters must choose between saving the winter stores, pursuing the assassins, and preventing frightened farmers from slaughtering the reeve's company. By dawn the keep is masterless, both orders are suspect, and the assembled freeholds name the characters wardens until spring--if they can keep the roads open and the realm from devouring itself.

Campaign Shape

Seed Grain

The company saves what it can from the tithe-moot, investigates the contradictory orders, restores the keep, and survives the first winter. Nearby freeholds judge the new wardens by whose hunger they answer first.

The Freehold Compact

The characters travel among quarrelsome communities, negotiating protection, law, roads, mills, and mutual aid. Each accession adds strength and an obligation written into the emerging compact.

The Hungry Borders

Alistair consolidates loyal districts while neighboring powers, merchants, pretenders, and raiders test the realm. Buried elderworks offer shortcuts whose activation could empower the compact or subject it to an older authority.

The Harvest Crown

The child heir nears majority as armies and delegates gather. The characters may restore the crown under binding terms, found a federation or republic, accept rule themselves, partition the realm, or discover a stranger form of government authored from the promises they actually kept.