Two of the girls Rose works with at the tea shop have been wanting to play some D&D, so we thought we’d have them over for drinks and a nice shipwrecking at Zzarchov Kowolski’s Scenic Dunnsmouth.
Now they’d never played an RPG whatsoever, so they got sent this email before the game:
So you’ll be coming to this place called Malles Vermald, it sometimes looks like this, and other times it looks like this, and sometimes it looks like other things entirely.
It sounds like this, and this, and this, and this, and this.
It tastes like a choc-chip mint icecream sundae served by a swamp bear on drugs.
The time period is kind of a nonsense 16th-17th century renaissance/era of enlightenment type deal, with conquistador-style exploration in vogue and science and anatomy starting to be a thing.
Most everyone has a bit of an air of frontier conquest about them but people have been living there for at least a few hundred years without ever having seen a native inhabitant, but historical documents only exist from the last hundred years for some reason.
The biggest and best city is Cörpathium, which sometimes looks like this or this or this or this, and was mostly already there when we found it.
There aren’t any elves or dwarfs or hobbitses but there are four major ethnicities.
The Moors are steeped in mysticism and have near pure-black skin, like polished ebony, with pupil-less white eyes and rich silk clothing dripping with jewellery.
Urgoths/Saxons are the pale mongrel children of might-as-well-be-Europe.
Francs are like their more effete olive-skinned cousins.
The Morgen are pale to the point of ethereality with epicanthic eyes and bullshit Lovecraftian names, when born they’re anointed to the sect of one of their hundred gods instead of taking a family name.
The animals are weird and awful and you’re probably going to lose bits and catch diseases and maybe die.
There aren’t simple ghosts and demons but there are things that operate on a different level of existence that might drive you insane or turn your flesh against you or both or something worse.
YOU CAN BE ONE OF FOUR THINGS!
Magic-Users aren’t lame old wizards they’re crazy weirdos who risk insanity and mutation and destruction.
Clerics aren’t noble holy men they’re delusional ritualistic heretics who worship things that might not even exist and have to please them to use their power.
Fighters like to hit things with swords.
Specialists have mad skills and depending on what you want to do could be assassins or thieves or trackers or librarians or whatevs.
If you super badly want to be any of those things let me know, otherwise we’ll make it up on the day, that’s what Rose always does.
And then I threw them on a boat bound for Cörpathium and we started things a little bit differently.