@nitsua60 -- say, what does your existing 5e sandboxy campaign world look like btw?

@Shalvenay set in the Bronze age, in a high-elevation glacial valley and mountain ranges. The region's called "The Roof of the World."

@nitsua60 nods yeah, I'm not sure if I could quite hang with the bronze-age thing

(although overall, how's it turning out?)

What's wrong with pushing yourself?

@Shalvenay Not problematic. It turns up much more in the social/societal construction than in technology, per se.

@nitsua60 ah, interesting

@nitsua60 more of a taste thing I think

We dropped martial weapons and heavy armor as a first stab at it, and have occasionally said "nah" to a piece of equipment.

And there's no currency.

People are mostly nomadic, though one race is trending toward proto-monarchy. They've got four permanent settlements ranging from couple-hundred to ten thousand inhabitants.

The four races that mostly people this area are Halder (human), Gulati (human), Goliath, and Svirfneblin.

hrm, what are the primary foes the PCs face?

If there are any others, we haven't seen them yet. (And we've only seen signs of Svirf, none extant yet.)

@Shalvenay So the Halder--and most of the group is Halder--have begun building a standing army and patrolling the valley to safeguard their proto-settled peoples. (Rather than following the herds, maintaining small plots and fenced pastures.) This is very disruptive to Gulati free-range life, so there's friction there.

Gulati hunt-bands have occasionally harassed Halder patrols or appropriated domesticated herds.

So Halder patrols are stepping up "enforcement" against a people who have no notion of land-rights.

that sounds like a recipe for nastiness

So Gulati have managed to build a huge magical "fence" that keeps out non-Gulati humanoids. And inside they've assembled a good 15K zombie-army.

not the zombies!

@Shalvenay As one player put it once, "oh good, it's like we get to roleplay the original sins of our American ancestors." I think I've been chatting with @BESW too much =)

(To be fair, that was a pretty good assessment, until discovery of the zombie army.)

So now the PCs have (a) infiltrated the Gulati necromantic "temple" (b) obtained an artifact called Stonebreaker which should help bring down the fence, and (c) are probably going to pop the cork on a war that's been brewing for years. =)

And they're not quite sure yet which side they actually think is "in the right."

...yeah

This, of course, is a trouble one runs into when allowing ~me~ to build a world. It's generally pretty shades-of-grey, 'cause I'm an inveterate "on the other hand..." kinda guy in my thinking.

Classes are restricted to Barbarian, Druid, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, and (WM) Sorcerer. There are no known/named deities.

@nitsua60 I can work with some degrees of shades-of-grey in the world because that allows me to get down to underlying problems instead of simply having foes that are perpetually at each other's throat for no reason whatsoever

but at the same time -- sometimes I like having someone I can paint as "holy cow, these folks are bad and you should feel bad if you try to defend what they do"

I guess that's part of my ~problem~. For the foes/factions/whatevers to have a reason to be at each other's throat, I've got to come up with something that's reasonable as their motivation... at least reasonable when viewed from their perspective.

@nitsua60 yeah -- I usually wind up making my "holy cow, these folks are bad" folks religious fanatics, or way-out-of-control crime rings/syndicates

@Shalvenay That's part of my hope with breaking this "fence"--that the zombie horde will be unleashed beyond the necromancer's control and there'll be a while of having (morally) easy targets for some hack-and-slashing.

@nitsua60 *has this picture of a necromancer running around like crazy, screaming "GET BACK HERE YOU FOOL ZOMBIES!"

Gotta run and break up the sleepover-shenanigans. Time for 8-year-olds to be settling down. Have a good night.

subplot idea btw -- necromancer puts bounty on heads of escaped zombies, dead or alive :p

@Shalvenay nice call--jotted it down.

[takes notes for Morts]