I'm gonna try making a homebrew setting for my 4e campaign (once my books come
). I need suggestions, ideas, whatever. I've left the campaign description open-ended so that people can fill in the blanks for what they think would work.Well, here goes:
The world is largely unexplored. The Empire of Eranthion lies on the western coast of the continent, and the world beyond the borders of the kingdom are mostly unexplored. Some terrible cataclysm has caused the destruction of almost all knowledge and civilization. Now humanity (and the allied races of Eranthion) must rediscover the world. The PC's are selected by the emperor to explore the land beyond the borders for Eranthion (why are they selected? some previous act of heroism, perhaps, or maybe coincidence). A grand ceremony is planned to celebrate the heroes leaving to go on their journey. In the middle of the festivities, right when the king’s bodyguards start to lose their focus, the king is assassinated. Who is this assassin and how will the campaign develop?
You say the emperor gives the PCs their mission and the king is killed by an assassin. I'm assuming that's not a typo and that the king and emperor are separate people? Perhaps the local king wishes to explore for his own reasons and didn't want to cooperate with the empire at large?
Assassin might be...
agent of the emperor seeking to silence/stop the king?
agent of monsters or a foreign nation sending a warning against exploring?
agent of temple which fears people discovering truth of catastrophe?
agent of minor noble attempting a coup, pinning it on the PCs?
a vengeful undead released during the catastrophe with a vendetta?
a madman who kills to keep the population in fear of what's outside?
Way to start the campaign with a bang.
You say the emperor gives the PCs their mission and the king is killed by an assassin. I'm assuming that's not a typo and that the king and emperor are separate people? Perhaps the local king wishes to explore for his own reasons and didn't want to cooperate with the empire at large?
Assassin might be...
agent of the emperor seeking to silence/stop the king?
agent of monsters or a foreign nation sending a warning against exploring?
agent of temple which fears people discovering truth of catastrophe?
agent of minor noble attempting a coup, pinning it on the PCs?
a vengeful undead released during the catastrophe with a vendetta?
a madman who kills to keep the population in fear of what's outside?
To clarify, I meant to type emperor both times, but I guess I wrote king:D . I wrote a little bit more about my campaign setting:
The world is almost entirely unexplored, due to the destruction of knowledge and civilization that resulted from the use of Sigil, a floating magical fortress with terrible powers. Several centuries have passed, and the humanoid races live on in blissful ignorance of the fact that the Rain of Dread Fire ever happened. The Sigil is in fact a gateway to the planes and a celestial forge, created by the good deities to forge their armies of warforged. During the creation of the cosmos, after eons of war, the demon lords began to wonder where these seemingly unending legions of warforged were coming from. The leader of these fell creatures, Orcus, found a way to the Material Plane and Sigil. He rallied his hordes of demons and launched a bloody campaign to take Sigil. After centuries of fighting, the deities abandoned all hope of holding control of Sigil. Orcus finally took control of the fortress and demanded that the deities swear an oath of neutrality. They had no choice but to retreat and abandon the Material Plane. The deities saw what free will was capable of producing in the warforged, so they created the humanoid races in a final attempt to undermine the power of Orcus and his fiendish armies. Orcus created the monstrous races by breeding fiends with the humanoid races. The celestial races created grand civilizations, while the demonic races forged brutal tyrannies where fear and hatred were the only laws. The two opposing parties eventually discovered each other and war broke out. The celestial kingdoms began to falter under the strain of constant battle. The humanoid kingdoms would not be destroyed from without, but from within. Agents of Orcus began to infiltrate the inner courts of the celestial kingdoms, sowing distrust and fear. Some of the threats from within weren’t controlled by demons. Men began to take advantage of the tense political situations and tried to grab as much power as their greedy hands would allow. The internal and external power struggles eventually became too much for the humanoid kingdoms. The celestial kingdoms became too scattered and disunited, and this was all the monstrous races needed to crush their enemies. Orcus used the magical power of Sigil to summon storms of Dread Fire to destroy the scattered remnants of the humanoid kingdoms. A few surviving kingdoms banded together and fled from their shattered homelands. The deities of light despaired, for their creations on the Material Plane were again shattered by Orcus and the evil deities. Now only the heroes can stop the plans of Orcus from coming to fruition…
The only plot hole I see here is why the humanoid races would have forgotten their roots so quickly. Maybe some church to a false deity used magic or psionics to make the populus forget Sigil. The assassin could be sent by the church to keep the PC's from finding the truth (great idea quickleaf;) )