Introduction
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Long Ago, there was a great fortress built during the First Age. The people who made it and even the existence of this fortress was lost to time, until the Domain of Chronicla appeared. And with its arrival, the fortress sunk into the earth.
Not too long after Chronicla’s arrival, the druid Wintersplinter discovered the Twilight Grove in the citadel’s depths. There he found a Gulthias Tree, a demonic tree born from the blood of a vampire and the stake that killed them…and from which sprouted a supernatural fruit known to cure any disease.
Sometime after that, twelve years after the arrival of Chronicla, a pair of adventurers arrived at the nearby town of Oakhurst to venture into this Sunken Fortress searching for the origin of this magical fruit. They never returned.
When the current Baron of Chronicla, the Angel of Shadows named Amaunator Izayoi, heard of this, he dispatched a group of his own adventurers, to find what is lost, and get to the bottom of the incident.
As I mentioned before, the first campaign project in Tales of Penumaria will be “The Sunken Fortress: The Sunless Citadel remix.” This campaign will take the established campaign from D&D history (recently updated for Fifth Edition in Tales of the Yawning Portal) and modify it for a homebrew setting with more fleshed-out environments, expansive lore, and many others before it gets completely published. The construction of this campaign will be an example of what the Paid Tier will be like, as I create more content and consider the Substack worthy of having a Paid Tier in the future.
Along the way, it will provide ample fodder for future worldbuilding articles, as future articles touch on how I will set up certain items in the campaign.
The Storyline
There have been several Gulthias Trees among The Realms, but they all have their origin from a single known tree created from the stake that slain a vampire by the name of Gulthias. A detailed origin of the Gulthias tree, which originates in Oerth (the Greyhawk setting in The Realms,) will be included in the campaign, which includes how this tree gets reproduced in the many other worlds in The Realms. (For those who just joining us, ‘The Realms’ is the total multiverse of all known worlds in fantasy and science fiction settings, including not only worlds in Roleplaying Games like Dungeons & Dragons, but various movies, books, video games, and so on.)
One such transplanted Gulthias tree found its way into Chroncila while it was still a domain of dread in the Ravenloft setting, and it was responsible for the Dread Lord of Chronicla, Kirigan Morovich, becoming a vampire. When the Angel of Shadows inherited the role due to shenanigans (Kirigan was slain by Chronicla’s answer to Tatyana, who was in turn slain by Amaunator) he bargained with the Dark Powers to planeshift (physically transport a patch of material land from one plane or world to another) Chronicla into Penumaria.
(In exchange, the Dark Powers get to set up an Amber Temple near Chronicla to be a prison to would-be Force Lords, which were responsible for a cataclysmic war known as The First Sundering. This will be more important elsewhere)
When Chronicla got planeshifted, so did its Gulthias tree, where it materialized inside an abandoned fortress, causing it to plunge into the woodland mountainside, creating the dungeon in question.
How the campaign starts
The campaign starts in Chronicla, where Amaunator plays the role of a Group Patron and informs the party about the Gulthias Tree. He’ll task the party with investigating its whereabouts and, if necessary, chop it down. This part about Castle Chronicla being a group patron can be doubly so because there will be an option for the party members to be all Castle Chronicla Servants.
Once they arrive at Oakhurst, they will receive more hints over what is happening there. They will get more clues with each visit back—provided they look for it, that is—and eventually, they will come to reports that ramp up the importance. They will now only find out about the blights and the fruit of the Gulthias Tree, but also of a rival band of adventurers which had fallen into trouble and must be rescued by the player party.
The Town Portal Scroll
In order to facilitate all those returns to the town, which I’ll encourage, especially for more novice players, I will be introducing a new item in my campaigns which were taken from the Diablo series: The Town Portal scroll.
Each Town Portal Scroll is an easily reproduced and dedicated Transportation Circle scroll that only works within a certain distance (usually in a distance of miles in all directions) centered on a particular Transportation Circle set in the town in question. Reading the scroll creates a portal that only the party (the reader of the scroll and up to six other people) can use (but others can tamper with so the party must take care of where to put it in the dungeon,) to duck back to town to refresh, reload, unload loot, and get that needed bit of information that would otherwise require traveling all the way out of the dungeon and overland back home. Once the party does their business in town, they can go back through the portal where it closes behind them, and the spell ends.
To ensure that they won’t get abused or overused, they will have an increasingly rising price tag. The first one’s free, but the next one will cost 10 GP, then 25 GP second, then 50 GP, 100 GP, 250 GP, and so on.)
The Organization
I mentioned earlier what the organization will be like for all of my campaigns, but for The Sunken Fortress, let’s expand on it some more. As I said before, the module will be organized in Microsoft OneNote with the following break-down:
Part 1: Introduction will include the basics of the campaign, including the flowcharts, and the overworld map. Some suggested character options (including new options provided in Appendix 2: Character Options) will be given. Setup instructions especially with the initial parts of the Vault and any event decks will be available as well. In the end, a Session Zero will be given, introducing the characters to the campaign and the players to Penumaria. Session Zero scenarios that take place in Chronicla will be there as well.
Part 2: Oakhurst will include Oakhurst in its (more or less) entirety and detail. This part will include info on the overland travel and loot runs, referencing any appropriate Event Decks.
Part 3: Citadel Floor 1 will start the dungeon, with its two floors divided into different levels. This will deal with the Kobold and Goblin factions and how to deal with them, as well as discuss the various puzzles and miscellaneous complications that come about
Part 4: Citadel Floor 2 will continue the dungeon into the Grove area, where the Gulthias Tree is found. He’s here where they meet the druid and deal with his mechanizations
Part 5: People is where the Four-Dimension Spreadsheet beings, with all the characters involved given their own description and stat blocks. This will also include an extensive description of Wintersplinter, which will lead to a future free article on Villains.
Part 6: Places is where any locations that require a more detailed description, or need a map of their own, will be placed.
Part 7: Things will be for all the other items that come into play here, including the key items and whatever magic items, books of lore, pieces of interest, and whatnot.
Part 8: Other is where everything else that didn’t fit into the above parts takes place in. This is where all the Event Deck material is described, as well as items such as having Castle Chronicla as a group patron. There will also be a possibility for a group of adventurers who are Castle Chronicla servants, orphans that Amaunator hand-picked and trained into a proper adventuring party. This will lead to another article in the Free Tier on Group Patrons.
Appendix 1: Stat Blocks will have all the stat blocks that weren’t mentioned previously, whether they be creature, villager, magic item, spell, vehicle, or anything else.
Appendix 2: Character Options will have all the additional options available for possible characters. Whatever they’d be a Custom Lineage, Class Archetype, Feat, Spell, or Background.
The Article Breakdown
With that in mind, I want to give a breakdown of the articles I’m planning for the construction of the project. I’m lettering them because I’ve yet to put them into the queue.
Article a: Introductions. This will expand on the introduction, include Castle Chronicla as the group patron (it’ll be Amaunator who gives the party the main quest.) and introduces the main characters, which will be the two ‘rivals,’ Talgen and Sharwyn, as well as Wintersplinter the Druid, who will replace Belak the Outcast as the main villain here. In fact, there will be an upcoming article on how Villains are set up that will use Wintersplinter as an example.
Article b: Oakhurst. Oakhurst in general is depicted, and I’ll be expanding Oakhurst from just a series of paragraphs in Tales of the Yawning Portal into its own fleshed-out city with a map and various villagers stat blocked. I will include the Transitionary area between Oakhurst and the Dungeon, which I’ll expand on later in this article.
Article c: Dungeon Floor 1. The first Dungeon floor includes the local drama between a clan of kobolds and the clan of goblins which the party finds themselves in the middle. Fortunately, the two groups traditionally don’t bother the party much as long as the party doesn’t meddle in matters that don’t concern them.
Article d: Dungeon Floor 2. Also known as the Grove Level, this floor is a completely different dungeon, with a different atmosphere and the influences of Wintersplinter. This will lead up to the main battle.
Article e: The Gulthias Tree Battle. The climactic battle has its own article, mostly because I need to not just detail the tree itself, but also the peril it put two adventurers in. The original version of The Sunless Citadel doesn’t deal with how to save those two, but this version will.
Article f: Gathering the Pieces. The remaining pieces that I have let over get discussed. I fill in the rest of the 4-D spreadsheet and start piecing everything together in the OneNote Book.
Article g: Bringing it all together. The final assembly of the first playtest model. I construct the Vault and have all the Event Decks set up. I lay out the worksheets and provide flowcharts on when to give out the hints and lore and finish everything up.
Article h: Releasing the Playtest. Version 1.0 will be out. I might be being a bit too presumptuous to call a playtest campaign as Version 1, but I felt that a solid and cardinal starting number was in order. The published version can be Version 2 or three. Nobody would mind. Or nobody should.
The Playtesting
Once everything is constructed, now I think the time has come for something I believe I haven’t even touched to date: Playtesting. Despite the utter lack of an audience here on this Substack, I actually do have friends to play Dungeons & Dragons with. I need to get a group of them together who can help me iron out the kinks of this campaign I created…well, remixed, but you get the idea…in an environment that won’t pull my hair out, where I could get some constructive feedback on improving not just Sunken Fortress but Penumaria as a whole. But that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I get to it.
Maybe I’ll either stream, serialize or even novelize here in the Substack. I’m sure it’ll generate some interest.
Supplemental file:
Sample Event Deck
And while we’re on the subject of Event Decks...I’ll be putting the Oakhurst-Sunken Fortress Event Deck in the supplementary material. As mentioned earlier, an Event Deck uses a standard Poker Sized deck of playing cards, with different instructions on the deck’s constructions and use. In the supplemental file, I work on the Event Deck in the area between Oakhurst and the Citadel.
This Event Deck will serve multiple purposes. One is to actually find the location of the fortress, the second and subsequently other uses can be used for a subfeature of the campaigns I have: Escape from Tarkov style Loot Runs where the party can earn that needed item to continue the main story of the campaign.
The URL for this file will be here: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AjNYReLtj6OIoCzq76b _JvSGHSiH
In future Articles:
The next article will be about the setup of a group patron in the Penumaria campaigns. While Castle Chronicla is mentioned in the campaign, I will use The Keepers of the Feather as the example here.
An Edit: In an earlier version of this article, I did mention that the next article would be on Villains, with Wintersplinter being the example. That article will come later.
In the midst of this, the next episode of Tablelake Arisen will be put out there, and Amber of the Woods Episode 3 is in the works as well.
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Tales of Penumaria is Copyrighted ©2022 David “David Foxfire” Gonterman, and is licensed under the ‘BY-NC-SA’ Creative Commons License. All Dungeons & Dragons related material is available under the Open Game License from Wizards of the Coast. Follow this link for credits and details on the licenses.