Over the past six months or so, we've effectively fleshed out the deep background of the Lost World, tackling such basic issues as religion, politics, and geography. Now that we've laid a solid foundation and devised a general "feel" for the campaign, it's time to start designing some of the more concrete resources we need to begin play.
Once again, let's begin by creating a "home base" -- the town or village that serves as the adventurers' home during the early phases of the campaign. Back in Dragon 258, we considered a few simple strategies for creating an effective base. Let's employ those same strategies again this time around, taking care to select an entirely different set of options to illustrate an alternative approach. Without going into much detail (since you can read the whole of the earlier piece for yourself online), a brief recap of the ingredients of an effective base is in order.
In short, the main function of the home base is to provide the adventurers with a safe haven to which they can retire between adventures. Remember, good adventures tend to tax the adventuring party to its limits. Unless there is a relatively safe sanctuary in which the party can regroup and lick its wounds, it's unlikely they will survive for long. It's also important to note that the safety of their home base gives the players an opportunity to let their hair down and spend some quality time roleplaying. After all, it's hard to be a jovial dwarf or a gnome prankster when your character is in constant mortal danger.
The second most important function of a good home base is to provide the players with the infrastructure they need to tackle their adventures. Even the strongest and bravest adventurers need access to temples where they can get their wounds healed, and shops where they can purchase weapons and supplies. For this reason, it's important to make sure that the home base is well stocked with these types of resources. It's also important to give some thought to which goods and services you want to offer for sale in your home base and which you want to force the players to leave the comforts of the base to obtain. Although you should offer a good selection of weapons and equipment through the local shops, for instance, it might make sense to make the adventurers travel to a nearby city (risking encounters and adventure) to obtain more sophisticated armor and weapons or information about magic items. This tactic will provide you with a handy springboard you can use to draw the players into an interesting adventure.
Of course, designing an effective home base for the Lost World is going to be a bit more challenging than usual. One of the defining characteristics of the Lost World is the sense of danger that permeates the whole setting. Somehow, this mood is going to have to be reconciled with the requisite safety of an effective base. One obvious tactic for achieving this goal is to provide a truly safe base but to curtail the goods and services offered within, forcing the players to frequently venture out into the world.
In addition to its two main functions, there are a few additional characteristics of a home base that we've already identified:
Local Authority
The relative safety of the home base implies that there's some sort of force that guards the base and keeps it safe. This usually implies that there is a local authority of some type that controls the army of peacekeepers. This is important to note, since we'll have to make sure to define this authority as part of the process of designing the base.
Townsfolk
Throughout the campaign, we're going to need to introduce new NPCs, both to serve as springboards into adventures and to give the players someone to interact with. A base that plays host to a nice mix of locals and visitors helps accomplish this goal.
Rumor Mill
Another staple of the home base is the tavern, inn, or other gathering place that serves as the local source of rumors and gossip. Again, such a mechanism will prove invaluable when it comes time to interest the players in new adventures.
Fantasy Element
Finally, it's fun to make sure that you give every town, city, or base some touch of the fantastic, just to reinforce the epic, otherworldly flavor of the D&D game. These touches can range from magical structures to the presence of a fantastic creature in the base itself to the existence of a spell or curse that effects the entire area.
The Valley Sanctuary
The typical home base is a town, city, or stronghold. For the Lost World, though, we'll adopt a somewhat different approach. We've already decided that the world is relatively uncivilized and that permanent towns and cities are quite rare, since it is difficult to defend such structures from the ravages of the outside world. Another problem is the segregation of the Lost World's society. While there is certainly interaction between the various races and tribes described in the earlier installments, let's suppose that each tribe lives in its own self-contained community, reinforcing the idea that the tribe is the most highly evolved political structure on the planet. This characteristic makes it especially challenging to create a meaningful base that can serve as a home to all the characters, since we don't want to force the players to create characters who all hail from the same tribe or race. After all, the D&D game works best when there is a great deal of variety in the adventuring party.
The ideal home base, therefore, is a construct that somehow stands outside the tribal structure -- a unique community that welcomes members of all the various tribes without declaring allegiance to any of them. It is also housed in an unusually defensible setting or structure, explaining its permanence and relative security. At the same time, it offers a limited set of goods and services, forcing the players to frequently venture out into the world.
Here's a solution that neatly fills half of the bill -- a tiny valley that can be sealed off and easily defended from raiders and encroaching dinosaurs by a relatively small number of soldiers. Such a structure seems like a perfect home for one of the Lost World's rare permanent outposts of civilization, but we still need to figure out just how this setting fits in with the political situation. What if the valley sanctuary were the domain of a single powerful individual who doesn't owe allegiance to any particular tribe? This individual allows outsiders to dwell inside the valley retreat, coming and going as they please, so long as the outsiders obey a strict set of rules. Starting with this idea, let's create a character to fulfill this role.
About forty or fifty years ago, a powerful Solaani sorceress named Janda had a falling out with the rest of her tribe and led her followers out of the elven strongholds in the hills to form their own community in a nearby valley. Before beginning her self-imposed exile, Janda was one of the elders of the Solaani tribe and something of a hero among her people. Although most of the Solaani believe that Janda departed because the tribal leaders wouldn't permit her to share Solaani lore with outsiders, the other tribal elders know the truth: Janda left just before she would have been involuntarily exiled for heresy. Like all Solaani elders, Janda knows that all the members of the Solaani, the Inuundi, and the various human tribes are actually mind fragments of the great god of light who ruled over the Lost World several centuries ago and is now deceased (see Dragon 283 for details).
A few years before she left her tribe, Janda started to have strange dreams that proved difficult for anyone to interpret. Ultimately, she realized that the dreams were trying to tell her that she could work a powerful spell capable of reassembling a significant portion of the light god's mind from the fragments embedded in herself and a few other "attuned" Solaani scattered across the Lost World. Once he lives again, the elder god could then defeat the tyrannosaurs that house the remains of his ancient enemy (again, see Dragon 283 for details) and bring true civilization to the Lost World.
The other elders of the Solaani find Janda's ideas dangerous for a number of reasons. Even if she can accomplish her aims, the Solaani are afraid that the reappearance of the god of light will only lead to a reappearance of the god of darkness, igniting anew their age-old conflict and possibly destroying the Lost World altogether. Even if the god of darkness does not arise, the elders fear that the planet's inhabitants might be forced to live in thrall to the reawakened god of light. For these reasons, the Solaani elders refused to aid Janda and forbid her from either contacting the scattered Solaani she sees in her dreams or undertaking a quest to unearth the ancient lore necessary to devise the great spell.
As a consequence, Janda and a handpicked band of loyal followers vacated the elven fort in the hills and built their own stronghold in a narrow valley located nearby. There, they work to locate the remaining "attuned" Solaani and craft the spell necessary to reawaken the god of light. So far, Janda and her people have been pursuing their mission for more than fifty years, and there are still several years remaining before the work will be complete. All this time, the exiles and the Solaani have been content to leave each other alone, though the tension between them can only start to grow once Janda nears the completion of her goal. Most of the Solaani elders believe that some sort of open conflict is inevitable.
Because she is a kind and compassionate person, Janda has opened her valley stronghold to anyone who wants to live among her people. As a result, hundreds of merchants and disenfranchised members of all the various tribes in the region have taken up residence in the valley. All who live in the stronghold agree to abide by a strict set of laws drafted by Janda herself and enforced by the impressive array of soldiers who are at her command. For the most part, these laws are designed to keep the peace and promote goodwill, though there are a couple of unusual provisions in the code as well. Particularly worthy of mention is a law that requires anyone entering the stronghold to pay a full 30 percent of the wealth they are carrying (coins, jewels, or trade goods) as a tax. Janda uses this money to feed and clothe the poor and to support the army that defends the stronghold. This law will accomplish our aim of forcing the players to spend as little time in the home base as necessary. If they are forced to give 30 percent of their wealth every time they enter Janda's valley, the characters probably can't afford to run back to the base after every encounter.
Needless to say, only a handful of the valley's residents are aware of Janda's real mission. Even among her own followers, only the eldest and most trusted know exactly what the exiles are hoping to achieve. As such, most of Janda's story qualifies as a "secret" as defined by the Second Rule of Dungeoncraft.
All in all, this setup should be particularly effective for a number of reasons: It gives us an interesting home base that can credibly claim a wide variety of residents, and it's structured in a way that urges the players to travel often and explore -- simply visiting any of the region's tribes for consultation forces the players to leave the stronghold and undertake a wilderness trek across the Lost World. Best of all, Janda's backstory provides us with a springboard we can use to launch adventures and a handy storyline that might come to define a later stage in the campaign. Will she and her followers accomplish their aim? If so, what happens next? Finally, what does Kor the tyrannosaur god think of all this?
Along these last lines, here's just a bit more background that might prove useful. Janda's story begs an obvious question: What's so special about her? Why does she alone among all the Solaani experience the dreams and hear the call of the light god? Before we answer this question, remember that when the light god perished, his consciousness was shattered into millions of pieces, which eventually became the Solaani and all the other intelligent mammalian races on the planet. Today, each of these living beings embodies a tiny piece of the light god's mind. What makes Janda and her fellow "attuned" Solaani different, let's say, is that they actually sprung from the portion of the god's mind that housed and generated his dreams. Since dreams don't require the conscious mind to flourish, these dreams have managed to live on even after the god's apparent death. After several generations of various Solaani families, the dreams are now manifesting themselves once again and leaving their current owners with an irresistible urge to regroup to bring the light god's dream self back into being. This is worth mentioning since an important aspect of the light god is actually able to communicate with Janda through her dreams, perhaps providing a useful means of touching off adventures or providing the players with some timely exposition.
Next month, let's develop Janda's valley in some detail (more than we applied to Aris' Ironoak stronghold back in issue 261) to provide a good example of a fully fleshed-out home base.
Dragon #285 - Janda's Valley: Part I
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