Part 1 of a campaign setting with some unique features – like limited immortality, topological insanity, a touch of the Wild West, and the Church of the Holy Octopod…

40,000 words done for the next post in the Trade In Fantasy series and it’s still not ready to post. So it will be a monster when it does appear… This series isn’t a time-out, it’s a fill-in – inspired, believe it or not, by an phone company advert!

The Town Of Splinter

This image gives an impression of Splinter. It’s actually the city church of a place called Ludwigslust. Image by Stephanie Albert from Pixabay

Picture a town from the Wild West named Splinter – saloon, bank, general store, sheriff, jail, blacksmith, the whole nine yards – in a lushly fertile valley (the image above may help). A river runs along one side of the town, down which farm produce is delivered by barge every Saturday. On Sundays, the residents of the farms that produce this food and the town congregate in the church for prayers to the octopoidal god Cthelchek. Farmers and townspeople then attend a feast laid on by the local monarch, King Jeremy, and then a huge open-air market where produce and supplies for the week to come are purchased and where clerical and arcane services can be obtained.

On Sundays when the moon will be full in the coming week, Elves from the Forest Of Asthar make the journey to the town to join in these celebrations and trade the leathergoods, soft fabrics, and magical trinkets that they produce.

Two Sundays after the Elves come the Dwarves of the Zugarth Mountains, miners who wrestle iron, copper, tin, lead, silver, gold, and the occasional gemstone from the earth and rock, trading those commodities for the supplies that they will need over the month to come.

On the nights of the dark of the moon, the town transforms completely. Strange shadows emerge from the walls to reveal gargoyles who are invisible and inanimate the rest of the time. The buildings twist and transform into gothic nightmares, or so it seems to anyone seeing them from the outside. In the graveyard, the hungry spirits of the long-dead rise and stalk the streets, usually accompanied by swarms of bats. Roving packs of giant rats emerge from the sewers to steal away anything that is not firmly attached to building or ground. Locals and visitors bar their doors and windows and do not open them for any reason until the break of Dawn.

At such times, the dark God Kechleth holds sway, rousing the populations of fell creatures and evil folk that surround the town’s environs and sewing mayhem wherever possible. Twisted, evil, and malignant, he plots and schemes the downfall of Cthelchek and the civilization that worships and empowers him. A thousand times has he sought its destruction by a thousand different means, and a thousand times, he has failed or been thwarted, most frequently by the bravery and self-sacrifice of noble Adventurers. Kechleth is the sworn enemy of all that is wholesome and civilized.

Heroes In Splinter

Most people in Splinter and its surrounds are ordinary people leading ordinary lives. But every now and then, chance or fate steps in and touches someone facing this ordinary existence and elevates them to the extraordinary. The populace believe them to be ‘touched by Cthelchek’ and devote every effort to training and preparing them to confront and combat the evils of Kechleth.

It goes without saying that every PC is automatically one of these extraordinary heroes, though most of the ‘extraordinary’ is only potential when they begin their adventuring.

Cthelchek and Kechleth

What the population, and especially any PCs, don’t know is that Cthelchek and Kechleth are one and the same being. When the dark of the moon falls, all the instincts and thoughts and hate that are normally suppressed in the benevolent Deity worshiped by the populace come to the fore and take over their shared body. His great advantage over Cthelchek is that he remembers everything that the Deity has done since Kechleth was last extant, every preparation made against his rule – but his actions are secret, unknown to his better self.

Splinter and it’s surrounding environs are a fantasy town unlike any other; a wholly artificial creation of the Ilithid Cthelchek for his experiments in torture and mortal psychology. As his experiments progressed, Cthelchek began to think of the subjects as his pets, and developed a soft spot for them and for the ‘reality’ that he had created to house them. This drove him quite insane, causing the suppression of his natural instincts and nature, which only re-emerge when the moon is dark. Make no mistake, by his own standards, Cthelchek is irrational, even mad, most of the time. If any aspects of Splinter or the world of Topologia don’t make sense, that’s why.

Time In Splinter

Splinter, as a reality, is extremely episodic – far more so than is usually even possible even in ‘episodic’ campaigns. One weekday feels like the last; every week feels much the same as the one that came before and the one that will follow. What differences there are form part of a monthly cycle, and a few – like the seasons – a very mild yearly cycle that repeats endlessly. It’s always the year 143 of the reign of the Tredor family, currently headed by the 45-year-old King Jeremy Tredor.

King Jeremy and The Population Of Splinter

The surname is evocative; every inhabitant not born within Splinter was stolen from their natural reality by Cthelchek and programmed to occupy a place within the unnatural reality he had created. King Jeremy, or one of his ancestors, may well have been an ordinary Merchant in their first life – but this memory and identity was erased and replaced. If Jeremy ever seems out of his depth, this is the reason.

Death In Splinter

Named individuals do not die in Splinter – not for good, anyway. A few days, a week, or even a few weeks later, they will be back in town AT FIRST LEVEL – and no-one who’s not a PC or Kechleth is even aware they were ever “gone”. If they died some distance from the town, it might be remembered that they were “away” for a while, and have now returned – nothing more. Nor do the reincarnated remember being killed or dead.

Undeath In Splinter

Cthelchek is the agency responsible for the resurrections; the “Moon” is actually a visible manifestation of the arcane device he created to perform the task of ‘restoring’ his ‘testing ground’, though he does not remember doing so. Cthelchek is himself as subject to the “Resets” as any member of the populace; after each, he vaguely remembers having created the world, and simply ‘discovers’ it as it now is.

However, changes that he makes to the town or its surrounds – material improvements, the ‘seeding’ of new mines, whatever – do accumulate over time. Remember that Cthelchek is completely unaware that he is also Kechleth, though the reverse is not true – Kechleth knows and hates that he has to spend most of his time in that form, and actively schemes to undermine and sabotage his creation; he just doesn’t get to act for very long at a time or very often. This means that he has to plant ‘seeds’ and leave them to mature on their own.

Change In Splinter

The only source of change in Splinter therefore derives either directly or indirectly from the actions of the Dark God, Kechleth. Much of what Cthelchek does each cycle is to overcome whatever “damage” Kechleth has done to his ‘domain’; the more overt and obvious, the more quickly this can be done, leaving more time for ‘improvements’ to the Domain. The more subtle and subversive it is, the longer it can persist before Cthelchek even notices it and takes remedial action. This remedial action may not be rational. As a result, despite the repetitive nature of the cycles, the setting does slowly evolve over time.

PCs In Splinter

This raises the question for the GM – are PCs the creations of Cthelchek as weapons against Kechleth, or are they some devious scheme by Kechleth intended to force Cthelchek into awareness of his true nature, making Kechleth dominant all the time? Either are equally possible, despite what the PCs, Cthelchek himself, and the Church of Splinter believe to be the case.

When a PC dies, they get reset and resurrected the same as any other named character. If the player chooses to continue with the same PC, it retains it’s memories of past experiences, including death, though it doesn’t know how it remembers certain things. If the player chooses to create a new PC, one that can follow a different developmental path, then their former character never gets touched by the event that made them something special and becomes an NPC like any other, while a new person gets ‘touched’ and becomes special in their place. The former PC no longer receives the gift of reset-spanning memories, and the new PC has no memory of the past adventures – though other surviving PCs can spin wondrous tales of those who came before them.

Danger & Adventures In and Around Splinter

Splinter is a town under constant threat from hostile forces, or sometimes by the forces of “nature”, or some combination of the two. These enemies are manipulated or controlled by Kechleth, many worship him as their God (though they may perceive his nature to be different than it is – as a God Of War, or a God Of Death, for example).

Adventures are basically “menace of the week” against a backdrop of the PCs figuring out the world around them and finding a way to take action about it.

Note that these menaces are ‘reset’ periodically in exactly the same way as the town – PCs can broker a peace treaty between the town and the Orc tribe of Zasleen to resolve one adventure only for both townspeople and tribe to forget that a truce ever existed.

This week, Kechleth recruits a vain shopkeeper into creating a dark Cult to attack the town from within; next week, a Trio of Beholders assault the town from without; the week after, the Elven Village is Razed by what appear to be Dwarves, sparking war between the two with the Village (which depends on both) caught in the middle; the week after, a strange tomb appears in the wasteland…

Threat Levels in Splinter

Especially early in any campaign set in this environment, threat levels should be much higher than GMs would normally inflict. You WANT one or more PCs to die fairly quickly so that they can discover the unique ‘reset’ attributes of the setting.

Alternatively, you could begin the campaign immediately after a reset in which one or more of the PCs were killed in backstory. Whichever character has the lowest hit points might be a good choice.

I’ll cover the ‘reset’ and what it means for PCs more extensively in the final part of the series.

Leaving Splinter

There are 5 ways out of town. Each leads to a different environment. Everyone knows of them, and most are two-way bridges between these environments. Attempting any sort of geographic or topological analysis of the town and its environs is an exercise in futility; there is, at best, a thin veneer of logic. But everyone ignores the irrationality because “that’s just the way it is”.

• A Hole In The Ground near the central town square, where the markets and feast are held, leads to a split in an underground rock; climb down it to emerge from a hole in the underside of a rocky arch in the desert. Or climb up it from the desert to emerge from that hole in the ground in the center of town.

I’ve modified this image from the Arches National Park in Utah to include the passage to and from Splinter (with a rope ladder for the townspeople’s convenience and to remove a photographer that was visible on one of the rocks). Original image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay.

• Next to the stables is a large barn. When you enter it, you find that it has doorways at both ends – one leading to and from Splinter, and the other located in the Fields of Gardenia.
• Opposite the Saloon is the Sheriff?s Office; an alleyway alongside it leads to the Wood Store. Like the barn, entry reveals a second doorway, into the Forests of Asthar (which is where the wood comes from, obviously).
• There’s a rocky mini-mountain on one side of town, not far from the Butchery, Blacksmith, and a distillery. An Arched Brick-lined tunnel through the heart of this hillock emerges in the mountains, near to the Dwarven Village of Zugarth for which they are named. Building stone is extracted from a quarry nearby, and wagons from the Dwarven Village convey ores that they have mined and smelted when they come to trade.
• There is a River, as mentioned previously. It is named the Everflow. Going Downriver leads to the top of an impossible cliff with a huge waterfall, named the Everflow Plunge. Chalk is mined near the head. Anything thrown down the watercoarse can be found (after a diligent search) somewhere in the Swamps of The Shadowfen.

The Everflow Plunge, with added Roc and bat-swarm. The base image is by Andreas from Pixabay. The Roc was created from eagle-1753002.jpg, no image credit provided, sourced from Pixabay. The Bat Swarm was created using this image set by Parker_West from Pixabay, with lots of subtle color tweaks.

• Going Upriver leads to the Fields of Gardenia, the Gilded Glassdust Desert, The Ironbarb Crags, The Shadowfen, The Forest of Asthar, and finally the Zugarth Mountains.

That’ll do it for part 1. There are six other environments and their contents to describe, so I’ll do them one or two or three at a time (I’ve already done 2700 words for the next part), then wrap it up with other elements – like where Cthelchek and Kechleth are and how the PCs can (eventually) get there.