The Stronghold Campaign

Described here is the setting for a Pathfinder campaign I shall soon be running. If you are one of my players: the information below is considered common, and your characters might be familiar with it! If you aren't one of my players? Well, I hope you find this of academic interest, or perhaps give you ideas for your own campaign!

In the beginning, there was the nothing. And from nothing our great mother Raia was born.

First of creation and creator herself, she bore forth the winds and the waves, the mountains and the valleys. And her children, second of creation and creators themselves, bore children of their own, and so it was, and so it ever would be.

Watching her beloved children play and fight and live and thrive and die, Raia was content. She slumbered, and all was as she willed it.

Until the planes shook, the stars tore, and the Cage closed around her unawares and cleaved her in twain.

As if in a great harvest, the best of all creators, of all creations, was plucked and stolen, the bare few spared from the Cage left clinging with blood-soaked hands to the scraps that remained.

In time, the Cage broke from within, freeing the stolen vitality of its ravaged worlds. The planes resumed their turning, the Gods rose back to their palaces of worship, and creation licked its wounds and carried on.

But such was not to be for great Raia. Her body remained shattered and hollow, her stolen children never finding their way home.

The best of Raia failed to protect their mother. The best of Raia perished where we know others survived. The best of Raia were consumed within the Cage.

It falls to her forgotten children to tend to their broken mother. It falls to her orphan children to see that, should the Cage ever return, it be smashed open once again, and for all eternity!

Take back what was lost! Build what never was! Help us become strong together, for in the Cage the meek and solitary were inheritors to nothing save death!

- Forward from the Disarum Book of Reclaimation

The world of Raia, named after its comatose creator-deity, consists of a single Pangaean land-mass that occupies roughly 50% of the world's surface, the remainder being taken up by a great ocean and polar ice-caps. Elevations increase the closer one gets to the centre of the continent, until reaching a great fissure that splits the land into two more or less equal plates. The area is tectonically unstable and sudden volcanism is common-place, making travel difficult and settlement foolhardy... for one on the West coast to reach the East without magical assistance, chartering passage over the ocean is the slow but safe option.

The wind of Raia is almost universally from West to East. This causes a substantial rain shadow that favours the Western Divide in matters agricultural: the Eastern Divide is much more desolate, but also more thaumatically active. Most of the population lives in loose tribes; where civilization has re-established itself, it tends towards culturally Feudal-Agrarian and Mercantile in the West, while the East is commonly Magocratic or Theocratic.

A distinguishing feature of the Raian landscape is its piece-mealness... while the continent is overall quite predictable, the terrain within an area will vary quite chaotically and abruptly. A lush rain-forest valley might lay amongst lifeless dunes of sand or snow. A lake might drain endlessly from the top of a plateau without any obvious rivers feeding into it. Scholars hypothesize that this jumble came about from disruption inflicted during the Caging, and some force, most certainly magical in nature, maintains the local climatic momentum of these pockets of strangeness. The other obvious inheritance of the Caging is a distinctive ravaging of the continent: everywhere, craters great and small, as if the land itself was set upon by a titanic set of melon-ballers.

You find yourself in the great city-state of Thamus. It is the Western hub for trade on the Amaranthian ocean and unofficially seen as the cultural and political Capital of the Western Divide.

For several generations the city has been ruled by the Ottiluce family, a merchant clan made powerful through innovations in ocean travel that made for safe and reliable trade with the lucrative Eastern cities.

The present king is the widowed Lord Byron Ottiluce. He has three children: oldest and heir is Prince Dominic. He is commonly thought to have less personal charisma then his father but is respected for his business acumen. His middle child is Princess Atlea, magically gifted but politically disinterested. The youngest is the ambitious Prince Veridian.

The dominant religion in Thamus is Reclaimant. The Ottiluce family became powerful through magical and scientific endeavors that enabled them to open up the East: most other noble families follow by their example. Amongst the lower classes, many other religions are practiced freely: Pelor has a great deal of sway, as do the racial creator-deities.

Rumors are swirling that something big is going to be announced soon: the Reclaimers of the temple of Disarum have been accumulating a wide variety of goods over the past few months, and little has been heard from the Ottiluce family over the past week. Something is going on, but no one who knows what seems to be talking.

Aliases: The One-Winged Angels, The Reclaimer
Lawful Good Intermediate Deity
Domains: Community, Strength, Artifice, Magic
Portfolio: Civilization
Favored Weapon: Heavy Repeating Crossbow

Disarum is the god of structures both physical and cultural. A young god of Mayors, Mothers, and Magi, Disarum incarnated following the tumult of the Caging and is concerned with the propagation of civilization back into the lost or never-claimed lands of the world.

While the other locally worshiped Deities were trapped within the Cage and the natural forces were disrupted by its influence, Disarum was for a time one of the very few reliable sources of divine magics in the world. Upon the Sundering the other forces have since returned to their places of power, which has greatly diminished the privileged status of the young god.

As an inclusive amalgamation of disparate clans, races, and cultures, Disarum is itself a composite deity, whose holy symbol depicts an entwined pair of one-winged angels in mutually-dependent flight.

Clerics of Disarum are expected to contribute always to the protection, advancement, and spread of their clans and cultures. Their holy robes are utilitarian leather smocks, appropriate for gathering the crops, working the forge bellows, or scribing in the library. Expert craftsmen and learned scholars are well respected and can rise to higher importance within the church then many of its own clerics.

Disarum is allied with many of the Creator deities, such as Moradin or Yondalla, contemptuous of Individualist deities, prone to conflict with Nature deities perceived to be misanthropic, and fiercely opposed to Demons and any deity associated with the Death or Destruction domains.

Background: As mentioned in Local History, you find yourself in Thamus. We'll go over how you got there, be it through residence, visiting, or incarceration. You either consider yourself an Adventurer or are amenable to entering the profession should an opportunity to do so arise.

Character Generation

House Rules