Editing E6 3.5 The Motley Crew (section)

==The Sambaqui Mounds==
Dotted along the coast of the Lesser Sea are barrow-like mounds known as Sambaquis, mostly overgrown and unnoticeable. The Church maintains that they are simply piles of refuse, shells and broken pottery, from ancient primitives who once lived here.

The common people know better, however. The Sambaqui are burial mounds for the first of the Kuo-Toa kings. Any man who sets foot on one of the mounds is blighted - he will never raise a son to take his place and his dreams will shrivel. A woman who steps on a Sambaqui will have her children taken by the Kuo-Toa but will be blessed with unnatural health.

It is said that the Barons, ignorant of common wisdom, have all stepped on Sambaqui and have even taken taken some of their wealth from the mounds. But they have paid the price.

*Characters are part of a small community who lose the majority of their defenders in a conflict - the PC's are the apprentices, squires and initiates who were left behind to provide a skeleton guard. Now they are all that is left. Using a 'points of light' [more a 'dark ages', really] background for the setting, the game becomes about dealing with the outcome of most of your workforce [and family] being dead, keeping the community alive and replacing all the lost resources that losing most of its fighting population results in. This will be hard to do in a resource poor world [if you consider population as a resource].

*The concept is fairly different to 'normal' [in the loosest sense] D&D, in that the characters start with a vital objective [save the village] and a resource poor environment to do it in [no high levels, no magic traders]. The community itself becomes the 'treasure' and the characters need to defend it from bands of looting orcs, various baddies and other adventurers... and the replacement of people in a small community is a long term objective, inclined to tie the party to one area.