[Chronicle] These Twilight Years, Preamble
Where the story’s world is set
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Note: These Twilight Years (or Les Temps Crépusculaires in its original tongue) is a homebrewed setting adapted from Paizo’s official Golarion setting. It is set in the broad area officially called the River Kingdoms (or even more broadly the Broken Lands which includes the nations around it), because it's perfect for a sandbox and it's close to where I originally started homebrewing Golarion back in PF1e (in Brevoy, maybe I’ll tell that campaign’s story another time!).
I fell in love with the mix of areas from Kyonin to Iobaria, from Galt to Numeria and the Crown of the World beyond, so I kept on adding things to it and making it my own.
Now it is a kind a parallel universe. Those familiar with Golarion and the Broken Lands will certainly recognize the names of places, events, broad plots, maybe some characters, but a lot is added and modified in the realm of nature, politics, religion and cosmology. The timeline is different, some events never happened and some are shifted around. I play this game of trying to rewrite/re-interpret a lot of the official setting while staying relatively close/compatible to canon so again, it’s a kind of “Simile-Golarion”.
As it grows with the campaign it becomes more and more like its own setting and I’m honestly tempted to do that one day. This is more of a sandbox setting which means it doesn't have a "main plot" to begin with, rather lots of potential stories to explore with overarching themes. As the PCs join that setting and as they start exploring it the main elements will quickly emerge.
The original ideas leaned heavily on miyazaki movies (specifically Nausicaä and Mononoke), a willingness to approach more humanistic, "light-hearted" stories where characters are treated with respect, violence is a symptom of deeper problems and is not always the best answer (and always with consequences, e.g. Undertale), and a fascination with a variety of celtic, slavic, central and eastern european tales, cultures, languages and songs. It also focused a lot on the idea of Melancholy and the Bitter-Sweet. It has grown a lot since and become something else but the original concept is still underneath it.
Thank you to the friends who have enjoyed the things I've been writing here and gave me feedback for this piece.
Now, onto the story!Go to Campaign Chronicles Index
The world has been changing. That probably doesn’t seem new, I’ll admit. The world always has been, always is, and always will be changing. A continuous dance, a constant-yet-uneven flow of radical change and reaction, as much as the Monadists might believe in a perfect cosmic balance.
In this case however the changes have been rapid and profound. We might not see it so clearly yet from our forgotten corner of the world. The Sellenite Expanse has always been on the edge of things; the edge of the “civilized” kingdoms and nations, the liminal of wonder, where the old powers are still strong and the first songs still sung. To some it feels like some old sweet dream is fading away and with it the spirits, beliefs and stories of our people. To others this world finally wakes, and its awakening would sweep away the old superstitions and terrors, bringing radiant progress and prosperity. While one dream spins away, the new one still struggles to be formed, turning over in our troubled sleep. It revolves. In its revolution all bonds are shattered, all ties ripped apart, all that was clear is clouded, all that was unclear reveals itself and even the gods doubt.
Far to the south the renewed Empire of Taldor rapidly develops using wondrous machines and terrible weapons, their borders and wars ever-spreading. Fuelled by the blood of countless bodies, its ever-expanding mines and factories darken the Porthmos hills with their smoke. The glorious metropolis Oppara reaches unimaginable prosperity and its bright-eyed smiling citizens walk the continent to share this new dream wherever they can.
The other great nations of the world all follow suit—desperately, hysterically—lest they vanish like shadows in the burning dawn.
To the west, over the dark waters of the Encarthan, the twice-returned lich Tar-Baphon broods and slowly gathers his strength. Unseen since his catastrophic liberation twenty-one years ago, his undead armies are nevertheless moving along the coasts of the lake.
To the north it has been thirty-two years since the Fifth Mendevian Crusade finally triumphed over the demonic hordes. While the traumatic, pyrrhic victory has brought new hope for the people of Sarkoris, many haunted veterans and mercenaries now wander the expanse; along the many roads and rivers they bring nightmares in their bags and struggle to exorcise their own demons.
To the east the proud and quick-tempered Rost—once a frontier outpost of the Empire—strives to kick their old masters of Taldor out of internal affairs and keep their sovereignty. Generals nervously watch Issia in the north and Galt in the south for any sign of aggression or weakness and spy networks wage cruel invisible proxy-wars. The old and bitter rivalries between these neighbours—or the hand of Taldor working through them—could unleash war in the very heart of the Expanse. Further east still in the Old Iobaria, mysterious diseases rack through the land and nature goes mad. Tales of maddened trees and bloodthirsty plants are dismissed as exaggerated hearsay. For now.
In these twilight years, at both the edge and the middle of all sits the Sellenite Expanse. The first song, the wild frontier, the basin of the moon, with a hundred city-states and a hundred caravans. Vast hills, plains, forests and mountains criss-crossed by the largest network of rivers ever known: the Sellen rivers.
Connecting all of the expanse in culture and trade are the western, central and eastern branches of Sellen. Three colossal arteries spanning from Sarkoris, the Lake of mists and Rost converging to the south, all the way down to Taldor and the inner sea. From the maligned revolutionary Galt to the many tribes and strange metals of Numeria; from the disturbing cults of theocratic Razmiran to the cyclopean ruins of Old Iobaria; from the deep and protected woods of elven Kyonin to the arrogant Rost; and everywhere in the vast space between the expanse has been travelled since the second dawn of time by nomads.
Long ago—after the long-night of Earthfall when all was darkness and ash—the caravans of the Valak Enaid went on their first journeys and sung their first songs; reconnected the land and brought its people together in stories and in dance. Much time has passed and, while it seemed to some like the expanse would stay as it was forever, the outside world is turning and bringing it along. Nothing stays out of time.
One of these caravans—one of the oldest and most respected—is on the precipice. The “Three-Rivers Caravan”, or Trilen Vorda in its own tongue, is bleeding out. It used to go across the whole expanse; connecting to other caravans in the north, east and west. Now terrible misfortune, accidents and heartbreak have brought it low and only a handful of its people remain, weakly keeping to the road in the hope their luck might turn around at the next corner. Left unsaid, the word still rings loudly in all heads: Curse.
Our characters have joined this caravan in recent years; whether by fortune, misfortune or seeking it out they are all now kinsfolk bonded to eachother’s fates. It will be up to them—the young, new travellers—to clear a path ahead and out of danger; to safeguard the caravan, understand its past and lift this curse. They must go on their first journey on their own—what the nomads call a Beajour—to decide where the caravan must go next and find the safest course, and to come back with answers and memories. These will be, as for every Beajour, turned into stories, tales, songs and dances to be shared and passed down through time so that all might remember and learn.
The world is changing, the sound of hammers on metal and the smell of black powder reaches into our forgotten corner; everywhere we look we see worried faces and sickened hearts, and the sky takes on that ambiguous complexion of half-light. Night descends in the twilight’s wake, but beyond? However it turns, it will turn for us all.
