Birthright: Warrior's Heart IC

[Stycotl]

Spoiler

Show

OOC Page Link
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...arrior-s-Heart

I’m still keeping things vague until I know what your characters are going to be like. Right now there is still room for many different concepts. I’m narrowing it down to the southern coast of Anuire, but that doesn’t mean you have to be human, or Anuirean. Anuireans would be the easiest to integrate into the setting, but feel free to look beyond if you wish; I don’t mind helping you come up with a backstory as to why you’d be here.

If all of you choose something different, then we will move the game to somewhere other than southern Anuire. I have kept things general enough that it shouldn’t be too difficult.

These scenarios are what you are faced with at the beginning of the campaign. Your choices are few, and the enemy is quickly descending upon you. Act now. Should one of these strategies prove unfruitful, the others might still be available, and new ones wait to be designed.

Main Scenario

It is almost winter in the south of Anuire. You are comrades in arms, veterans of numerous battles and loyal guardians of the realm you call home. Dispatched behind enemy lines for purposes of reconnaissance against a rebel army that has the goal of usurping the throne of your king, you return to find your battalion routed and your leaders slain. The enemy now hunts the small, errant bands of surviving allies, bands such as your tiny group. Though you might thirst for vengeance or something more, your most pressing quest is simply to survive.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Scenario One––Stay Close
With hunting parties all over the realm and the usurper’s conspirators in neighboring countries, you decide to lay low where you are at and hope that they assume you fled the realm. Maybe you can quietly collect intel and allies. Maybe you can mount a guerilla campaign. Maybe the citizens of your homeland will rise up against the tyrant. Maybe. But for now, you hide in a hole.

Choice #1: Hearthfire Shadows
Your homeland consists of rolling farmlands and hills, and the diseased, inhospitable southern swamps. Not much to choose from with regards to hiding spots. But the former king’s castle is built on a tall island of stone in the middle of the capitol city. And at least one of you was close enough with the king to know of hidden tunnels. But good luck getting into the house of your nemesis and his troops.

Choice #2: Quagmired
You are a hardy lot, and know the endless mazes of the southern swamps better than the usurper’s mercenary forces. You hide until the hunters turn their gaze farther afield for you, and then you disappear into the fens. But life there is hard and miserable. And though hiding should be easy, getting lost could also be easy. And it will be difficult to collect intel, supplies and allies in the swamps. Then there are the denizens of the swamps to worry about too, both natural and unnatural.

Scenario Two––Escape!
In order to draw the usurper’s attention away from home, away from the citizens you love and protect, you flee, out of your own realm, trusting in your ranging experience to help you elude the enemy. Your plan works and the usurper sends scouts after you, obsessively hunting down any of those that dared fight against them. But the flight exhausts you, and you find that you cannot lose them. They are gaining, seemingly knowing your path at every turn before you even take it.

Choice #3: Drown Your Sorrows
There was little chance to escape. Those that ran were ridden down. You watched as friends and brothers were trampled and lanced by the usurper’s cavalry. There was no escape for them. But you found a boat. Huddled in a derelict fishing launch on the misty river, you simply let the current carry you out to sea. The horsemen can’t reach you, and by the time they secure their own boats, you are well ahead of them. But they are coming. And the sea offers its own dangers, most immediate among them being the early winter storms and occasional hurricanes that strike the southern coast so regularly.

Choice #4: Lion’s Maw
The realm to the north of you is no friend to the usurper, but it is no friend to anyone really, honorable and proud, but strictly isolationist. Its rulers are of dark-skinned foreign stock that the rest of Anuire struggles to trust or identify with. You could go there and seek aid, or at least, asylum. But almost the whole of the usurper’s army lies in your path, as most of your scattered battalion headed in this direction.

Choice #5: Web of Death
Far to the west of your homeland, with enemies closing on you from three sides, your only escape is through the black forests of the Spiderfell, realm of one of Anuire's most dreaded awnshegh. But the Spider does not welcome intruders, and its hosts of goblins are just as devious and cruel as the humans that hunt you.