Save the Town

The law of the land only allows a single town in the area to host the monthly market , which makes it easier to collect taxes on the market activities. This honor is up for grabs every 10 years. That anniversary is coming up in 6 months. The town the PCs are aligned with, Andren, is the current site for the market, but there have been less and less traders, and less and less buyers, coming each month in the last couple years. Sensing weakness and opportunity, a nearby town, Gahlen, has officially made a bid to be considered for the next 10 years. As have a few other towns as well. If the honor to host the market switches to another town, the PCs’ own fortunes, and those of their allies and friends will likely suffer. The decision is based on which town will be more likely to create the most tax income.

The Format

This will be a short campaign of roughly 4 sessions or “quests”, and will be Play by Post in the campaign’s Forum. We’ll have 2 threads. One will be “IC” (in character) and the other will be “OOC” (out of character). IC will be in game description and dialog. OOC will be any out of game discussions we need to have and also any dice rolls. So at the end the IC thread will read like a story without any of the “crunch” in the way.

The genre will be “action/adventure”, so there will be mystery/puzzles, and serious/gritty, and humor/puns, and monster slaying, but not focusing on any one in particular.

The setting is a pretty generic classic medieval style setting. Probably with forested areas around and some water ways and maybe some mountains or hills. At present, I don’t think it will be close to a sea, but I’m not ruling that out yet. But we can assume that other cultures exist in the world and that some people do travel, so any classes or races or weapons are okay to use in character builds.

I’m not sure what technology level that would mean other than that firearms do exist, but are fairly rare, and hand crafted. So gunpowder would also be rare.

Magic is “medium”. So it’s not unusual to see magic, but most people don’t have it as a part of their everyday life.

Monsters definitely exist. It’s unusual to see them domesticated, but it has been done. Generally the towns patrol the areas around them to keep the monsters back, but monster attacks outside of towns are common. The fewer towns in an area, the more common the attacks would be.

Terrain will be some forested, some hills/mountains, some rivers/waterways/lakes, some town/city, some farming/ranching. Not likely any desert. Not likely any ocean/sea. Not likely any jungle/rain forest. And since I don’t personally know anything about snow, there likely won’t be any heavy winter type situations.

I expect there to be some monster slaying. And political intrigue. And some traps and puzzles, though probably not a traditional dungeon…though I’m not 100% on that.

I don’t expect this to be “epic” in the sense that they are “saving the world”, but in a sense they are saving the world of the people that live in the town because a change like losing the market hosting privilege would mean most of them couldn’t live in that town any more. It wouldn’t support them without the extra business that comes from the traders that come through every month, and/or the access to the goods that those traders bring.

The PCs have to create their backstories so that they already know and like each other. And in this case, the PCs also have to have some backstory reason that their character is connected to the town in a way that means the PC wants to help the town.

Some generic ideas could be:
- relative in the town
- grew up in the town
- love interest or crush in the town
- business in the town
- investment in the town
- land owned near or in the town
- associated with a shrine or church in the town
- trading political favors
- paying off a debt
- paying back a traded political favor
- prophecy
- atonement for past wrongs
- townspeople nursed back to health
- looking for some information on a long running quest and the town leader has offered the information in exchange for help
- only town where the PC’s favored food or drink or tavern or other business can be found (as if Norm was going out adventuring to save Cheers from being closed)
- the town somehow protects a natural “treasure” (like a particular grotto or grove or cave) and the PC is sworn to protect that natural “treasure” as part of their religion or code

Feel free to go as creative with this association as you want. I will work it into the story.