Beyond Iskander’s Gate: Mothership Hack for 923 A.D Central Asia Campaign

From Theresa Grieben’s series of world history maps for the BBC


Apparently this is the year of the beta release. I ran a campaign using Mothership house rules I called Beyond Iskander’s Gate for 6 sessions that I canceled due to scheduling issues. But 10th century Central Asia is so rad and deeply underhyped as a setting for fiction and gaming and learning about the workings of Volga Bulgars, Khazaria, the Abbasid Caliphate, The Byzantine Empire, The Rus (Vikings make everything cooler) and their relations with each other kept me interested for months. Shifting frontiers between societies make some of the best RPG historical settings. Cultural variety and political instability are the bread and butter for a party of ambitious misfits with questionable ethics looking for adventure. Adding some paranormal events to the mix is even more fun.

My favorite source for this campaign was “Penguin Classics Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North” is the most gameable primary source. This review from False Machine really showcases the crazy inspirational value for the RPG enjoyer.

Campaign Overview

The year is 923. The Islamic world thrives in an age of science, law, and cosmopolitan splendor, though the Abbasid Caliphate’s political power wanes beneath the gilt surface.

You are members of the Ikhwān Al-Ṣafā, the Brethren of Purity—a secret order of scholars from Baghdad, devoted to uncovering the universal truth through every field of knowledge, including the occult.

Your mission: Investigate the truth of a mysterious letter from Ibn Fadlan, a member of the order and the caliph’s ambassador to the Volga Bulgars, where he describes the bones of a giant in the northern woods. You’ve just arrived at the great Persian city of Bukhara after months of travel and have months left before your caravan will arrive in the recently converted land of the seminomadic Bulgars, where the riches of the fur and slave trade have grown their influence in the region.

 Some learned scholars in Baghdad claim these lands lie beyond the Iron Gates built by Iskander the Great, said to hold back the forsaken barbarian tribes of Gog and Magog until the Day of Judgment.

Beyond Iskander’s Gate Character Creation for Mothership


Turn from the sleep of negligence and the slumber of ignorance, for the world is a house of delusion and tribulations.
-from the Ikhwan al-Safa, or Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

― H. P. Lovecraft

  1. Roll Stats: Strength, Speed, Intellect, and Combat at 2d10+20 each.
  2. Roll Saves: Sanity, Fear, Body at 2d10+20 each.
  3. You have 2 Wounds with 1d10+10 Health each. 
  4. Choose a Background (Class) from the list or create one. 
  5. Write down the Skills from your Background and their bonus percentage to your rolls using them. 
  6. Roll on the party relationships table to figure out your character’s relationship with the character of the player sitting to your right, write it down. Reroll if either of you want.
  7. You start with 100 silver dirhams each, a brass medallion with a dove on it, and 5 pieces of personal equipment you could get in 923 AD Baghdad. Your caravan has enough food. Everyone speaks Arabic.
  8. Let’s go on a journey together.

Backgrounds

Astronomer  

Navigate (+30%)
Mathematics (+20%)
Occult (+20%)
Foreign Lands (+10%)
Language (+10%)

Esoteric Scholar

Occult (+30%)
Alchemy +20%
Language +20%
History+10%
Religion +10%

Geographer

Foreign Lands +30%
Navigate +20%
History +20%
Natural World +10%
Language +10%
Survival +10%

Islamic Jurist

Religion (+30%)
Bureaucracy (+20%
History (+20%)
Occult (+10%)
Underworld (+10%)

Historian

History +30%
Foreign Lands +20%
Language +20%
Language +10%
Bureaucracy +10%

Market Inspector

Bureaucracy (+30%)
Language- Pick One (+20%)
Underworld (+20%)
Religion (+10%)
Disguise (+10%)
Language (+10%)

Siege Engineer

Siege Weapons (+30%)
Construction (+20%)
Mathematics (+20%)
Military Tactics (+10%)
Navigate (+10%)

Hermit or Mystic

Occult (+30%)
Religion (+20%)
Natural World (+20%)
Survival (+10%)
Foreign Lands (+10%)

Poet or Musician

Art (Poetry or Music)  (+30%):
History (20%)
Language- (+20%)
Foreign Lands (+10%)
Religion (+10%)

Doctor

Medicine (30%)
Bureaucracy (20%)
Natural World (20%)
Religion (10%)
Language (Greek) (10%)

Merchant

Bureaucracy (+30%)
Foreign Lands (+20%)
Language (x) (+20%)
Ride (+20%)
Art (Poetry) +10%

Blacksmith

Craft- Blacksmith (30%)
Mathematics (+20%)
Athletics (+20%)
Art (Engraving) +10%
Melee Weapons +10%

Laborer

Athletics (+30%)
Construction (+20%)
Survival (+20%)
Underworld (+10%)
Bureaucracy (+10%)

Thief

Underworld (+30%)
Disguise (+20%)
Atheletics (+20%)
Melee Weapons (+10%)
Swim (+10%)

Caravan Guard

Melee Weapons  (+30%)
Foreign Lands (+20%)
Ranged Weapons   (+20%)
Ride- (+10%)
Language- Pick One (+10%)

Brigand

Ranged Weapons (+30%)
Melee Weapons (+20%)
Streetwise (+20%)
Medicine (+10%)
Ride (+10%)

Officer

Military Tactics (+30%)
Beaucracy (+20%)
Ride (+20%
Melee Weapons (+10%)
Language-Pick One (+10%)

Ghilman (former slave soldier)

Melee Weapons (+30%)
Ranged Weapons (+20%)
Military Tactics (+20%):
Foreign Lands (+10%)
Language- Pick One (+10%)

Hunter

Ranged Weapons (+30%)
Survival (+20%)
Natural World (+20%)
Navigate (+10%)
Melee Weapons (+10%)

Sailor

Pilot (+30%)
Navigate (+20%)
Swim (+20%)
Foreign Lands (+10%)
Melee Weapons (+10%)
Language- Pick One  (+10%)

Create Your Own?

1 Master Skill +30,
Two Expert Skills +20,
Two Trained Skills +10,

Skills List

Alchemy
Ride
Mathematics
Foreign Lands
Siege Weapons
Art (x)- Poetry, Music, etc
History
Survival
Athletics
Medicine
Bureaucracy
Melee Weapons
Swim 

Military
Tactics
Craft (x)- Blacksmithing, Weaving etc
Navigate
Language (x)- Greek, Persian, Latin, Turkic, Slav, Rus, Hebrew, Chinese
+10% is basic, +20% conversational, +30% fluent.
Criminal 
Occult
Construction
Disguise
Pilot
Ranged Weapons
Natural World
Religion

Any skill can be known at a Master level +30, Expert level +20, or Trained level +10.

Party Relationship Types 1d5 Table (Inspired by Fiasco)

Everyone goes around table to roll to determine their relationship with player’s character to the right.

Type of Relationship

  1. Family
  2. Romance
  3. Society
  4. Crime
  5. Friendship 

1. Family

1. Siblings. Blood or Foster
2. Parent and Bastard
3. Cousins
4. Parent and Child
5. Uncle/aunt and nephew/niece

2. Romance

  1. Spouses, loveless
  2. Forbidden lovers
  3. Divorced spouses
  4. Rivals for the same heart
  5. Spouses, committed

3. Society 

  1. Rival palace courtiers 
  2. Poet and patron
  3. Slave and master
  4. Teacher and student
  5.  Foreigners

4. Crime- Banu Sasan

  1. Charlatan and Assistant
  2. House breakers
  3. Assasin and former target
  4. Former Brigands
  5. Opium dealer and habitual user

5. Friendship

  1. Wine drinking buddies
  2. Comrades in arms from the war
  3. Childhood friends
  4. Met on the Haj
  5. Friendly rivals in all things

Some Entries from the Real Journal of Ibn Fadlan

A giant
Tikīn told me that in the king’s lands there was a man of extraordinary size. When I arrived
in that country, I asked the king about him.

‘Yes, he was living in our country,’ he told me, ‘but he is dead. He was not one of our
people, nor was he an ordinary man. His story is as follows. One day some merchants set out
in the direction of the Itil River as they were in the habit of doing. The river was in flood
and had broken its banks. A day had scarcely passed when a group of these merchants came
to me and said: ‘“O king, we have seen a man swimming on the waters a man of such a kind that if he belonged to a people dwelling near us there would be no place for us in these lands, but we would have to emigrate.”

‘I set out on horseback with them and reached the river. I found myself face to face with
the man. I saw that judging by the length of my own forearm, he was twelve cubits tall. He
had a head the size of the biggest cooking pot there ever was, a nose more than a span long,
huge eyes, and fingers each more than a span in length. His appearance frightened me and I
had the same feeling of terror as the others. We began to speak to him, but he did not speak
to us and only stared. I had him taken to my residence and I wrote to the people of Wīsū,
who live three months’ distance from us, to ask for information about him. They wrote to
me, informing me that this man was one of the people of Gog and Magog.

Gog and Magog
‘They live three full months from us. They are naked, and the sea forms a barrier between
us, for they live on the other shore. They couple together like beasts. God, All-high and All-
powerful, causes a fish to come out of the sea for them each day. One of them comes with a
knife and cuts off a piece sufficient for himself and his family. If he takes more than he
needs, his belly aches and so do the bellies of his family and sometimes he even dies, with all
his family. When they have taken what they need, the fish turns round and dives back into
the sea. They do this every day. Between us and them, there is the sea on one side and they
are enclosed by mountains on the others. The Barrier also separates them from the gate by
which they leave. When God, All-high and All-powerful, wants to unleash them on civilized
lands, He causes the Barrier to open and the level of the sea to drop and the fish to vanish.’
I questioned the king further about this man and he told me:

‘He stayed with me for a time, but no child could look at him without dropping dead and
no pregnant women without miscarrying. If he took hold of a man, his hands squeezed him
until he killed him. When I realized that, I had him hung from a high tree until he died. If
you want to see his bones and his head, I will go along with you and show them to you.’
‘I would like very much to see them,’ I answered.

He rode with me into a great forest filled with immense trees and shoved me towards a
tree under which had fallen his bones and head. I saw his head. It was like a great beehive.
His ribs were like the stalk of a date cluster and the bones of his legs and arms were
enormous too. I was astonished at the sight. Then I went away.

Some Entries from the Imagined Journal of Ibn Fadlan (Recovered by the Player Investigators In-Game)


Departure from Bulghar

I hired a crew of Rus, strong men well-versed in rivercraft, to take us down the Atil in their longship. Though pagans, they were skilled and reliable. We sailed toward the forest of the Samara Bend, drawn by the rumors of giants who still remain there by the bones of the one the king had brought me to see. The Rus disbelieved these rumors but have taken my coin to carry myself and Bars the Slav downriver. It is good and proper to seek to learn more about such wonders of Creation so that one may further increase their appreciation of the world and help others do so. The Atil was calm and cold, its waters guided us steadily toward the South for three day’s journey. It is in the land of the Burtas, a tribe opposed to the Bulghars and also subjects of the Khazars.


The Samara Bend and A Sighting

After arriving, we climbed the hills over the Samara Bend, our party reached a dense forest where the trees grew tall and close, their branches entwined. Many birds and animals dwell here but I am told no fur bearing animals live there  and the land is rocky and hard so the Burtas do not often visit. As we ventured deeper into the forest, we heard a low thudding in the distance as the beating of a great drum. The sound grew, and with it, the earth seemed to tremble. We halted, peering through the thick undergrowth towards a wide trail, there we beheld the giants.

The four giants stood thrice the height of the tallest Rus, their limbs thick and heavy, their skin the color of stone.They wore no clothes to cover their nakedness, both their men and women. Their hair hung in matted locks about their shoulders. They seemed to possess great strength but little in the way of reason. Their faces were broad and heavy, with features like boulders.

One of the giants turned its head towards us but did not see. We took this as a sign and departed, careful to avoid making any sound. We did not stop until we had returned to our beached ship, giving thanks to Allah for our escape. I have been told that these are the people of Gog and Magog by the Bulghars. Bars said the Rus named them “jotun” and pressed upon us to leave as they think them eaters of man as the Bulghars do. I reminded them of the half payment of silver still awaiting them on my return and they relented


The Ritual

Bars and I disembarked with caution, leaving the longship along the shore. The Rus remained behind, their faces pale with fear, unwilling to follow into the dense forest. With Bars leading the way, we climbed the hills, moving through thick underbrush and towering trees following the trail of the giants until we came upon a clearing.

Four giants stood before an outcropping around a small cave entrance where a landslide had fallen from the cliff. We watched from the brush as the giants conducted a strange ritual. They each carried a slain deer in two great hands with the same ease as a man holds a chicken. With care, they took the deer’s blood in their hands and each dripped it over glyphs carved into the stone around the cave’s entrance placing each before setting the remains aflame with loud shouts much like words but like no tongue known to me.  We waited until the giants had finished their work and left down their trail before we approached the cave.


The Cave and the Giants’ Return

Bars agreed to stand outside to watch so that we would not be caught and trapped in the cave without escape. The entrance to the cave through the ash and remains was not wide enough to admit the giants, and beyond it lay a wide carved passage that led deep into the earth. I followed it, a torch flickering on the walls, revealing more of the lined shapes etched into the stone. 

The passage opened into a vast domed chamber, hewn from the rock by hands larger than those of men. The air was thick with musty scent, and the walls were lined with enormous white stone vats. Curious, I pushed with strain to remove the stone lid of one. Each was filled with a dark, viscous fluid. I leaned over one of the vats to peer inside, and something cold and sharp leaped forth and bit into my flesh. I recoiled, only to see a pale, writhing worm burrowing beneath my skin. I tried to remove it, but it was too deep, its movement sickening me as it squirmed in my veins. I was overcome with dread.

Before I could gather my thoughts, Bars let out a shout of warning. The giants had returned. Their awful voices echoed with rage. I left the cave and we took flight as the giants closed behind us.They were upon our heels before we could reach the thick forest where they would be slow.

They caught Bars, and rended him in their hands as one smashes a grasshopper. A true friend, his life snuffed out in an instant. I was blessed to enter a thick stand of trees as another came for me, unable to pass quickly. I barely reached the longship as the giants began hurling logs and boulders at us. The Rus, seeing the danger, had pushed off from the shore with haste and I had to wade through water to reach the ship in time. One of their number was struck and killed by a rock of great size. The longship rocked violently but was not overturned. I could do nothing but collapse overcome by exhaustion. We returned north, each day bringing us further from this darkness by the light of Allah’s grace.

Inspirations:

Ibn Fadlan in the Lands of Darkness by Ibn Fadlan and assorted other writers
The 13th Warrior directed by John McTiernan
Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon
The Jews of Khazaria by Kevin Alan Brook 
The Long Ships or Red Orm by Frans G. Bengtsson
Ikhwan al-Safa, or Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity
The Strain (Nocturna) by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro
The Assassin’s Creed Video Game Series
Against the Cult of the Reptile God by Douglas Niles
Silent Legions by Kevin Crawford
Armies of the Volga Bulgars Khanate of Kazan by Osprey Publishing
Legacy of the Bieth by Allandaros
Iron Gates Blog Series by Skerples,
Against The Wicked City by Joseph Manola

P.S: Beware of Overprepping

The problem with historical settings if you have a tendency to hyperfixate and overprep is that the well of lore you can draw from research is endless. It’s the same difficulty with running a game in a detailed preexisting setting like Star Wars or Tekumel x10000. If you’re a recovering overprepper like me you fall into old habits and your notes can start looking like this.

When you start researching primary sources to create an accurate price list for goods when you’re running a paranormal investigation style game without asking how your players experience will improve by being able to know the historically accurate relative worth of an ermine coat and a big jar of honey you may be in the throes of a hyperfixation and not prepping useful material for your next sessions adventures.

I need to get over my misplaced desire to do “historical justice” to representing the era and embrace the “good enough, let’s have some fun” vibe that good RPG historical settings can provide. Kevin Crawford, author of Stars Without Number and a bunch of related systems recommends a simple guiding principle for all RPG campaigns, but I’d say applies even more to historical campaign prep.

Am I having fun? If you’re enjoying yourself, then
you can keep building. We follow this hobby because it’s fun, and if you’re enjoying the process then you
should let yourself have your indulgence.
Am I going to need this for the next session? If what you’re creating is something you know you’re going to need for the next game session, then you should finish it. Don’t let this feeling of obligation extend to every detail, however; it can be easy to imagine situations where you’ll need to elaborate some NPC or organization or location, but if you respond to every such possibility you’ll never get away from the drawing board. If you’re not having fun and you don’t need it for your next game session, stop it. You’re going to exhaust yourself on minutiae and trivia and not have the energy to do the parts you really do need, or the vigor needed to actually run this for the group.”

Good stuff to keep in mind.

Lethal Company: My Favorite Dungeoneering Video Game

Lethal Company seems to be blowing up on Steam currently and it’s the most dungeoneering fun I’ve ever had and I think it’s very accessible to get into. It’s also the best digital approximation of a session of Mothership RPG I’ve found I really, really, like it and think a lot of my enjoyment comes from what I love about OSR dungeoneering.

In Lethal Company, you’re players on a team of up to 4 interns/subcontractors that has a clunky spaceship on lease from The Company. You land your ship on a series of moons and delve into abandoned industrial structures with your friends over in game voice chat looking for scrap. And these moons and structures are filled with a variety of awful creatures that want you dead. Here’s a couple things I enjoy about the game that can be applied to OSR dungeoneering.


1. Debt


In the game you have 3 days to reach your profit quota from the scrap and items you’re able to recover from your expeditions. Each time you land on a moon is 1 day of your time. In the first days if things get too dangerous or a crew member dies it’s easier to call it early and try to get out alive with a minor haul, but as time gets closer to your terminal deadline the pressure of a fatal default leads to riskier decisions in spite of really not wanting to go back in.  “I don’t care what you saw in there, get back in- we’ve got to make quota!” This corporate horror framing helps answer the horror RPG question of “Why don’t they just leave this awful place?” and pushes players to constantly have to weigh their greed against their fear on each run in an awesome push your luck effect.

 I like this framing even more than the traditional OSR treasure as XP for encouraging adventurous behavior in a survival horror setting. It’s not just how you get better but if you don’t extract the required value in goods, you’re dead or as good as. The pressure of debt on your character is a constant needle to take risks or actions you don’t want to in order to keep your head above water and live to delve another day with an even higher quota to reach. Also relatable to lots of players.


2. Limiting Communication

The best way to play is using the in-game voice chat. Directional audio is excellent so you can hear where your buddy is as they walk around you, voices echo in canyons, and get muffled underwater. If you go out of audible range you need to carry an in game walkie talkie and communicate with a crackling static filter. It’s not uncommon to discover a coworker has died only by not hearing them for a second, turning a corner and seeing their twisted body and still glowing flashlight and having to breathlessly report it to the rest of the team.

A monitor inside the ship offers a radar that can switch cameras to view each player as a blue dot on the map. requires someone to stay back at the ship as overwatch instead of haul scrap if they want to use it and communicate intel about the layout of the facility, green dots representing goodies, and the presence and movement of red dots representing hostile creatures via the walkie.

One of the worst feelings is when you hear a cut short scream over the walkie from ground control person and know you don’t have anyone scanning for dangers around you and you’re going to have to go back there and face whatever killed them to escape the moon

Due to the difference in medium this is hard to pull off in tabletop RPG’s but I think for novelty occasions pulling players into a different Discord channel or room of a building and the GM jumping between them fairly rapidly to reduce deadtime is a fun gimmick to bring out rarely.

Splitting the party and cutting between characters’ viewpoints while the players are at the same table would be the more efficient way of doing this 90% of the time and I’ve used this to good effect in horror games. Foreshadowing dread is spooky and provides some of the joys of knowing dread when you see the thing moving behind a character in a horror film even if it doesn’t provide the actual lack of information. But as both the knowing audience and unknowing participant, tabletop RPG’s are in an interesting space between a horror movie and a horror video game and I think provokes cool feelings and experiences that are distinctive from both.

3. Woeful Underequipment

The Company recommends a rookie starter package that costs more credits then you start with, which sets the tone for the level of employee benefits and support you can expect in the game. This leads to creativity through necessity. Without enough money to get radios for everyone do we have one person stay at the ship? Do we just all run for it without someone watching the radar monitor? Dave died carrying the stop sign we found, but if I pick it up I can club this spider with it. As teams amass more credits they never have enough for everything they might want. Should we buy a teleporter or pay for fuel to get to the moon Titan and it’s more lucrative and dangerous terrain?   This vibes with the high focus on equipment and making the best of the tools you have with the environment in OSR type dungeon play.

4. Go Back For The Body!

The company docks your pay if you leave a body behind. This often leads to fleeing a beast that’s just slaughtered your coworker only to double back sneakily after being reminded of the cost for leaving them there. This has the same effect of the Funerals for the Fallen house rule of gaining the XP of fallen teammates for the equivalent spent on proper funerals and I think it’s fun and leads to stressful and occasionally silly gameplay benefits.

5. Swings between Terror and Hilarity

I haven’t played any other video game that pivots so strongly and frequently between the two poles. It’s a great time hanging out with your friends or nice internet strangers and joking and shooting the breeze that gets interrupted by moments of sheer terror and long stretches of building tension. The games PS1 era graphics also give it a goofy primativeness that also makes it spookier in a retro analog horror way.   

You very, very, rarely can get the feeling of true horror around the table in RPGs. Trying to enforce a single vibe at the table is counter productive. Humor is used to defuse tension and is a natural reaction and also fun. 

On the flipside I also think that a GM trying to be consistantly funny can rapidly turn into pure farce. Every game I’ve played at a con that marketed itself as humorous wasn’t as funny or fun to me as the unexpected laughs in other RPG sessions.

 Silliness is an emergent property of gaming and throwing too much of the GM’s own from the start often overspices the stew. The gameplay in Lethal Company acts as a GM that plays the horrific straight man to player shenanigans through the setting but with a cheeky sprinkle of dark humor that doesn’t take itself over seriously. It’s nice to have both things.
 

Stolen graphic from the excellent Mothership Warden’s Operation Manual

6. Easy to Get Into The Game

I’ve played like 12 hours total so far. Multiple times I’ve had a friend or random player join for their first round ever and told them. “You push 1 to dance emote, 2 to point, and we need to go into spooky buildings and grab trash to take it back to the ship and pay off the debt on the monitor or we’re dead in 3 days.” And they were good to go! When you die and get to spectate the rest of the team with the other dead folks in a voice chat, commenting on the livings impending peril and laughing about how you kicked the dust-this downtime is brief because each day is limited to ~10 minutes at which point the ship autopilot takes off at midnight. And the experience of watching mirrors my feelings when I’ve died in Mothership, OSE, or another game I can expect to hop back in lickity split without spending two hours of character creation.

7. Player Skill over Character Skill

There’s no permanent progression between plays, you can buy some better equipment like a shovel, teleporter, boombox, or a romantic table for your ship as you gain credits on each playthrough. Everyone is playing the same noodly armed intern in an oxygen mask. Much like Mothership there’s not really leveling up (though the company gives you XP that leads purely to a fancier job title on your hazard suit) and when your crew inevitably falls short of quota eventually you’re given a High Score. You get better at knowing the behaviors of creatures, natural hazards, and the differences between moons on each subsequent run and can pass this info on to new players.

8. Teamplay

The life of the game is your teammates. Your fates are welded to each other and the team lives in dies on the  mistakes,triumphs, banter, and sacrificial monster distractions to allow the other intern with the loot to get away from each other. 

More than that, the real person on the other end of the is what makes it fun. Because communication is such an important part of the game you spend a lot of time just chatting with the other folks on the team. There’s enough downtime and goofiness in the game that you get to just talk as well instead of constantly aiming for optimized behavior. On a mechanistic level there’s not that much going on in the game loop and it could seem boring. Get scrap, go to other moons, meet quota, get higher quota, get more scrap. What makes it so replayable and entertaining is the specific humanity of the player behind the player character. I’ve had a blast with friends but also complete strangers who I developed a sense of genuine camaraderie with after 2 hours on a team shooting the shit while dancing and pointing at each other, creeping through dark facilities, stealing alien bee hives, and huffing strange inhalants, and hauling each others corpses. The game has a lot of space for emergent gameplay.

The human element of playing with other people towards a shared goal while being able to communicate and goof off with each other is a lot of what I love about RPG’s. While not able to reach the same highs of experience as GMing a table of good friends in person, Lethal Company offers a bit of that joyous experience- which is quite the achievement for a $10 video game.

Bonus: Steal the Premise for Your Fantasy RPG.

You and the other PC’s have been branded for your crimes with a geas sigil -the Holy Order of Tharn believe all members of society deserve a chance to contribute without being constrained to a prison. If you don’t haul out enough gold pieces worth of treasure from these awful holes in the ground in the pockmarked Valley of the Old Ones and deliver it to your debt holders outpost you’ll be burned to a crisp by your searing geas brand in 3 days. Perhaps you can find a way to break the geas by paying it off or rising against your captors but right now you’ve got a quota of 2000 gold pieces and daylight is waning.

*Debtors brand entirely stolen from a suggested framing for a Hot Springs Island campaign

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