Intro to the Valley

Well since I haven’t played in a couple of weeks and this coming session will be a one-shot by me that probably won’t be anything more than a few simple fights, I’ve decided it’s finally time to give a little bit of information about my personal campaign “world” of The Valley.

There is no one place that it exactly originated. It came to me in bits and pieces while at a job over a decade ago, and eventually congealed into a usable campaign world.

That job was pretty much a mindless morass of work where I spent 8 hours a day, usually alone, working at an ancient machine. The job was neither fun nor interesting, but it allowed me several hours a day to think about whatever my mind decided was worth focusing on.

The timeline starts around the late era of AD&D 2E, when the Skills and Powers options books were being used by the group.

I was relatively new to the group then and we were running a three week rotation of two campaigns. One was Dale’s game using the S&P options. I had noticed that he was losing a little bit of interest in running as the campaign progressed in to the higher levels and less and less he was throwing at us was hurting us.

So I asked Dale if he would mind me taking over the campaign, and he had no problem with it. And in no time I was running a campaign with a lot of potential directions and PC’s with ever-increasing power…to the point where keeping things to the story was getting harder each week.

Although it was quite a fun campaign the group had lost 2/3 of its members in the span of 2 weeks. The three of us left decided to reduce our game to a single campaign, and I volunteered to stop mine because PC power had gotten out of control (100+ damage per round from a PC in 2E is disgusting).

For my next campaign I decided I wanted to keep the campaign limited in location while not trying to overtly prevent the PC’s from doing what they wanted.

At that time I had also been playing Might and Magic VI. There were a lot of quests and places and NPC’s in that game and they had the whole world set up for exploration.

So what if I could set up a lot of the game way ahead of the time, including monsters and maps and so on? This would give the players free reign to travel anywhere at any time and I’d have everything I needed ready.

In the end there was no way I could have done that without limiting the available campaign area to a small area while that area had plenty of opportunity to be interesting.

Mix those two aspects and I came up with the beginning of the Valley. For a reason that I had yet to come up with there was an area of plains land that had become totally surrounded by treacherous mountains preventing easy travel away from the place.

Next, how do I stop people from entering or leaving this place, or even knowing this valley even existed? Once the PC’s made it to a certain level they’re going to get Teleport; it’s a no-brainer.

The solution was easy, but kind of a “dick move” unless you give a good reason and make sure you have no loose ends.

My solution was something I called The Silver Veil. The same thing that caused the sudden creation of the Valley also ripped every bit of silver from the area so that it now permeated the air.

The back-story for this – This area was overrun by lycanthropes and they were at war with the uninfected people of the area. The lycanthropes were winning and hope was dwindling had a young and powerful mage not developed a spell that filled the air with silver and would destroy those with lycanthropy. But that mage did something wrong. The spell worked, but not as expected. Rock sprang forth from the ground for hundreds of miles around. The only unscathed area was within a few miles from the spell’s casting.

The lycanthropy had been suppressed, but the Veil also prevented summoning (but not conjuration of simple things, like food), teleporting, and so on. Even non-corporeal undead could not exist in this place.

And voila, no leaving the Valley by magic.

Yes, people did try to leave the Valley by foot, but they were never heard from again; the first fool moon after they left the area of the Silver Veil and they’d go on a rampage.

Now we have to fill in some blanks left by all that has happened to those poor people who survived such a nightmare.

Dwarves, elves, humans, and half-elves needed to exist so they could be PCs, so they had to be written in. There were no halflings, but that could have been ret-conned if it had to be.

The dwarves were originally part of a small clan that had made a home in some nearby hills that were rich in silver. Enough dwarves survived and found their way to the Valley.

The humans were, obviously, the survivors of the war against the lycanthropes who were lucky enough to be in the area that did not get raised hundreds of feet above where it used to be.

The elves were fighting alongside the humans, and joined with them when they set about rebuilding society, though they still remained separate from the humans on many levels and much smaller in number.

Half-elves were to come in time.

Then there were the goblins. That race survives like rats in a city, and they found their own way in this new place. They remained well hidden for years until they had enough numbers to burst out into the open, raiding for food and places to spread, eventually displacing the dwarves and forcing them to join with the elves and humans.

After much time, this new society settled into something stable, but with very few of the amenities or even resources they had before.

There was not much in the way of wildlife, and livestock was quite limited as well. After 300 years the only sheep and cattle around were weak from generations of inbreeding, but well taken care of, assuming no raiding goblins found them.

To assist in feeding the populace, each cleric was expected to conjure some food each day.

Water was plentiful as the seasons brought a nice cycle of snow then cool and clean river water from the high rocks above, which eventually drained into a rapid and treacherous underground river. Suitable lands near the rivulets became farmland.

In spite of the chili area above, the ground floor of the Valley remained quite warm, most likely due to volcanic activity.

Money changed slightly. There was no longer any silver currency, but since most of the populace was not exactly rich, copper was plentiful still. Platinum was quite rare, becoming more valuable in time. To fill the monetary gap, the city council established small, coin-sized discs of obsidian wrapped in iron as worth 10 gold.

Magic, like livestock, became limited and rare as there were few people left with the gift of magic. This was to change in time as some spells were found again or reinvented, but was quite harsh to begin with. Eventually the School of Wizardry was created to prevent any further loss of magical knowledge.

There’s a reason Dale has named the Valley “harsh world”.

Next I filled in a few things that I thought were interesting or needed to be done.

First, I hated that wizards had a limited number of spells per day and then they were done. I wanted to give them an option to cast more, but at a cost (because nothing special happened in early D&D without some kind of cost).

Thus I came up with the “innates”. People who had magic inside of them, barely controlled. They were like wizards but had no limit to the number of spells they could cast, though each casting ate away at them. For each level of the spell they cast, they’d take 1d4 damage, and for every 100 damage they had taken, they’d randomly lose an ability score point. Most innates eventually began to look like old men with scars from burns, something like Trashcan Man from The Stand.

Does the concept sound just slightly familiar? Well since I did not run this campaign until 3E came out, when they released the sorcerer class, I decided I liked the way WotC did it, and used that instead while still giving sorcerers the option to go above beyond their spell slots at a cost.

Since the general populace could not have people around that could lose control and burn houses down (some quite old and fragile), they were eventually put under the care of the School of Wizardry and taught to use their abilities. Eventually the first sorcerers came to teach the next generation of sorcerers, and so on. Eventually the School of Innates was created as a subordinate school to the wizards’ school.

Second, I felt that paladins should be rarer but more powerful. In a bit I’m not so happy with now, I decided there should be only 2 paladins in the Valley at any point in time – one an older veteran and the other a young one that is taught by the veteran. Looking back on it, I feel it’s too close to the Jedi/Sith set-up, but I’m not going to change that now.

As a result, only one PC can have a paladin, and for reasons covered below, he must be human and be a follower of the human god Brekaneth.

The plus side is that he starts with a magic longsword and plate armor. (No the sword is not made out of light.)

Third, if silver was part of the air, what if others could determine a way around the problem? What if they were vulnerable to silver? What if they were part silver?

Enter Lord Velserrad; hero and savior to the people of the Valley. His aid destroyed hordes of goblins saving the city time and time again. He was an ancient man who could die at any moment due to extreme age and had used magic to stretch his life far beyond its limit. He was also wholly evil and a vampire bent on world domination. If not for using powerful magic he would have been consumed and destroyed by the Silver Veil. The magic did not make him immune to the effects of silver on his vampiric body; it just delayed the effects long enough for him to invent a spell that would push away the veil for a week or so, all depending on how powerful of a magic item he sacrificed to the spell. Effectively any place inside his tower had no silver in the air, but he could never leave it. He created the façade of the feeble old man as a cover, and subtly manipulated the city’s powerful, gathering all the influence he needed to plan his escape from the Valley.

And yes, many people of the Valley would turn into werewolves if they stayed at his place during a full moon. He never let that happen if he could avoid it.

Now we have poor Polaris, a silver dragon at the time the Silver Veil dropped on him. His draconic magic protected for a short period of time, but unlike Lord Velserrad he was not in the midst of people who were desperate for help and some magic items to sacrifice or make for him.

Eventually every atom of silver was ripped from his body, though it did not kill him. The little time he had before his spell wore off allowed him to control how the Silver Veil attacked him.

Rather than killing him or possibly turn him into a rampaging freak of dragonkind, he became a shell of what he once was. He was plagued by constant pain, and his brain was little more than that of an animal but something of Polaris was still inside of him guiding him to make the right decisions.

He came to live in the lake now called Silver Lake, and he became the monster of the lake. Like the Lochness monster, people would occasionally catch a glimpse of something large in the water or things would disappear, large things, when people had their backs turned.

Polaris never hurt anyone that didn’t deserve it. His diet consisted mostly of goblins that did not heed the warnings and stories of the horrible beast in the lake.

Fourth, the citizens of the Valley had to live in something of an organized society.

The dwarves had been stubborn to begin with and did not join the humans and elves in the beginning. But within a few decades they had to flee from the goblins overrunning their new home.

Many heroic and good dwarves stayed and defended their home, giving their life for their brethrens’ escape. Most of the dwarves that joined the humans seemed to have something missing from them. (In game terms; the standard dwarven alignment had become lawful-neutral as the “selfless” gene was removed from the gene pool.)

These dwarves were the only ones left with the knowledge to mine from the new rock surrounding them, so they were able to still remain a bit separate from the city while still being part of it and receiving its protection.

Whenever the dwarves felt they were being taken for granted, they stopped production of iron and steel. This would usually cause the city to cave in to demands, and that was usually more money.

The elves were quite limited in numbers, but had much knowledge to teach. Teaching the humans how to take no more from the land than it can give was their first priority, and the humans were very reluctant students but they had no better options.

The elves needed the humans too, mostly for protection from ever reproducing goblins and also the humans were quite good at adapting to new situations.

Eventually the three races created a form of elected government as a forum to address all of their needs.

Fifth, and finally (for now), the religions of the Valley are not as diverse as other campaign worlds.

The small number of elves only had one religion, Corellon. They may have had more, but now only Corellon remains.

The dwarves, also limited in number, had Moradin. Like the elves, there may have been more, but now only Moradin remains.

The humans had several gods to worship, in the beginning.

For the human religion I took the best and worst of modern religions as I saw it back then and you have a god of protection, destruction, healing, and war.

Brekaneth, the god of the humans, has some very zealous followers. In a very few years after the establishment of the government of the Valley, only one human religion remained.

The exact details of how have disappeared from history, but we can assume some were integrated with loving arms and some were destroyed.

The Church of Brekaneth became a central part of the city’s survival. It trained soldiers and helped defend the city from countless goblin raids and attacks. Its clergy did much to feed the majority of the populace, especially during the first few critical years. It also pushed for more power at every opportunity.

Through the years the power of the church waxed and waned, sometimes having its own internal wars for which faction of the church would be dominant.

And there you have it, a minor tour of the beginning of the Valley.