E6 3.5 The Motley Crew

This is the wiki page for the campaign setting of The Motley Crew, an odd band cast into dangerous times at the end of the world.

Rules

Mechanics wise, it'd be quite low level 3.5, along the lines of the E6 rules modifications, and stay within this framework for the length of the [forseeable] game... [for those unaware of E-6, it is basically a set of alterations to 3.5 so as to halt level progression at sixth level - further abilities learned through an expanded feats list bought from every 5k of extra xp ]. Resource poor due to setting and the general removal of high level characters and their opponents...so there's a lot less magic, but a lot less need for it. A definite need for social skills. Alchemy and healing skills become more important, and that +1 dagger becomes a handy find indeed.

=Concept= (which is, in itself, another question).

• The Motley Crew

Welcome to Motley and Odd Arbage, a Manor town and Village port, respectively. They are located at the end of the world in a Dark age.

When the Grand and High Powers finally fell to arrogance and insane magics in the Great Age, they took much of the Light out of the world. Whole peoples, races, outsiders, and divine beings became pieces and pawns in their elaborate, ritual wars. They bent time and space, plane and cosmos to their bidding, summoning Eldritch horrors to their own amusements, stocking and populating grand territories with their own creations, violating ancient precepts and slaughtering their avengers. They bent the very fibre of reality to accommodate their increasing perversities, and as all things do, the Wheel finally turned. So much so that the Moon, it’s mother, spun a tear from the sky to finally quell the Dark.

The Grand and High Powers, in their arrogance unrepentant, were destroyed in a Light that decimated the Known lands. Only places like Motley survived at all - subject towns and cities far, far on the borders of the world, nestled in the lee of mountains that stood between them and where the Moon’s Tear touched the Earth. That was a long time ago as the Sages tell it, a generation even to an Elf. But the world still feels small this side of the mountains that saved the remnant populations of the hundreds of different types of subject peoples left behind when the Grand and High powers were consumed and used to rebalance the world.

Motley is an isolated manor and market town and has been for nearly 120 years - although two kingdoms and three empires have come and gone, Motley has been Motley through all of it. The same with Odd Arbage, one of several villages and clans owing taxes and loyalty to Motley. It is a Cliffside fishing town and deepwater port, home, like Motley, do well over a dozen races, clans and bloodlines from the last age. It has a small manor and residing Knight, a Church, and a small collection of houses and homes. It is also home to the adventurers.

The area is ruled by the Baron Motley, Lord Eastport - a title that has changed hands more than once. The current Baron hopes to establish a legacy, but then so did the last three.

Between them, the Town and Villages provide shelter for 2 000 souls, and support the surrounding 10 000 who work the land. The barony is sheltered between the Saviour Mounts to the East and North and the Karstfells to the West, and has very little flat, open land, except around the rivermouth. Odd Arbage sits East the mouth of the Aird river, which flows North and East through rugged, unnavigable twists and turns, all the way to the Lee Plateaus and the Monarchy of which Motley is currently a far-flung arm.

Not that it is an ignored subject - the fisherfolk bring in exotic southern fish and other things, dyes and shells the sell well in the north. The same with the local fruit and root crops - all have a market far away, which means coin and exotic goods, and the folk of Motley grow barley and wheat enough only for their own needs. Even the peasants do well by kingdom standards.

Add the odd merchant ship that ventures into Odd Arbage from the Lesser Isles or Moonburn, and the place is fairly cosmopolitan for a village of 350 odd.

Current situation. Bandits - or worse. Thats what the knight said when he gathered all he could - men at arms, the village mage, the local priest, the woodsmen, the militia - and rode out to hold Airdsford crossing. Fully two thirds of the fighting force of the Barony, leaving behind the sick, the older, the ill trained and the young. Now it is dawn two days later and there has been no word. The local Squire, left in charge, barely has enough stubble to rub in indecision - and no word comes from the North.

Someone has to do something...

This will fit in nicely on the Eastern edge of the Karstfells...and Bladhame becomes the reason for Odd Arbage receiving the merchant ships that occasionally call there.

Nearby Places and Facts

Bladhame

Bladhame, "Son of the Stones", was a dwarven fortress at some point in the distant past; a mountain hollowed out through unknown magics or unimaginable labor. A handful of dwarves dwell today, along with elves, gnomes, and a great many humans. Precisely what killed the original inhabitants of the city remains a mystery, but stories and theories abound. Ask any two Bladhamers, and you'll hear half a dozen tales between them.

It remains, however, one of the few remaining gateways to the World Below. Behind enormous stone doors, sealed with runes and sigils of obscure and arcane power, Taggit Dal Uggrit ("The Road That The Sun Never Sees") still runs deep into the earth, bringing the occasional caravan from the peoples who dwell below.

The trade in strange goods and stranger knowledge, these merchants, and none can truthfully claim to have seen their faces. But they deal honestly and well, and their occasional presence has drawn folk from great distances with the hope of learning...or acquiring...something that will give them a bit of power.

The Menfish

Premise: Kuo-Toa are evil aztec fishmen from a different, older evolutionary path before Man.

Late on the quietest winter nights, some of the shormost residents of Odd Arbage say that they can hear, just for a moment in the dead of night, a strange bell tolling out across the waters. By day, the stories are ridiculed, dismissed; but on those nights, the people of Odd Arbage shutter their windows tight and keep a roaring fire.

The oldest among them speak tales, when in their cups, of a time when the bells were answered by bells from the shore, and when they were they drew closer, and dark happenings took place at the shoreline.

But that hasn't happened for nigh-on twenty years, they say, though they glance fearfully at the odd gold trinkets that are in some family heirloom collections: little-worn and ill-favoured by all but the most brazen, who often come to a bad end.

Have new trinkets been seen around the town of Odd Arbage? None are sure. Perhaps the stories are so long-forgotten that the pieces are no longer seen as cursed. Perhaps some benighted jeweller is replicating them out of ignorance or misguided curiosity.

But the fishing this year has been the best ever; better even than the year before that, which was better again than the year before that... and some of the old folk wonder to themselves, and stoke roaring fires...

The Movealong Shadows

Once there were villages in the foothills of the Karstfells, to the west. Some of the elders can still remember when they were burned out, or found empty. Now only wild men, the nomads, dare to dwell there, and even they speak of enemies that come in the dark, through some moonless night or thick fog, leaving behind only empty tents to be found in the morning. None know who or what they are, but they move through the rocky hills like ghosts, evading watches and guards. Each dark night you camp in the same place you risk them finding you, and then you are never seen again.

The Karstfells

The Fells have a bad reputation, getting steadily worse the further west you go...which pushes Bladhames trade route undergound, where these attacks, oddly, never occur.

Your character might have been driven out of the Karstfells as a child...or know more than he's telling.

Considering the Karstfells as the fantasy equivalent of Bolivia/Central America cave system wise, this creates an environment where the surface is bleak and dangerous and the underearth is possibly safer and a more diverse, vibrant ecology...probably connecting to underwater rivers and ocean openings [a sunless sea or two?], where ancient marine races have found their contemptuous conquerers to now be a thing of history...

The Hellas clan

The Hellas clan has been in Motley since the world changed...though their circumstances have changed somewhat. The result of twisted, magical crossbreeding between higher and lower outsider bloodlines, the Hellas were magical accessories, bred much as pets are in some cultures. Those few in Motley at the time of the world change were part of the retinue of a minor local Power. When he vanished in a flash of light along with his inner circle, those Hellas left banded together with a few refugees to form their own clan - specialising in otherworldly magics.

There is only one family of Hellas clan in Odd Arbage - Natt the healer, his wife Eleanor the Herber and their daughter Bough - who seems to have a way with spirits and such.

The Order of the Blessed Bolts

The Brotherhood of the Blessed Bolt

This organization of wandering ranger/paladins formed after the Fall of the Moon's Tear to deal with the monstrosities that still roamed the land.

They do not crusade. They hunt and protect.

As monstrosities declined, so did the Brotherhood. Most went on far-ranging journeys to find evil, and few ever came back. Those that stayed became more like knights-errant, wandering and dispensing justice as they saw fit. Those few though kept the memory of the traditions alive, the techniques of monster-hunting, of the various weaknesss and vulnerbilites of demons, devils, lycanthropes and worse.

They revere the Father Sun, whose face watches and judges them by their actions everyday.

A fallen Brother is said to have forgotten the face of his father.

They train not so much in direct combat, as in stealth and attack from a distance, using specially crafted repeating crossbows.

• 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.