Campaign Background

"The Old Realms have fallen to the twisted horrors and mystical aberrations of an arcane event. You and a few hundred survivors have fled north to the Basin, the northern edge of the Old Realms across the Winterwyne River, to make a new life in the hopes that the calamity will not spread further.

In the wake of the migration, duty calls. Your new settlement needs to be defended from threats unknown, and the land around you is as foreign as the lands across the sea. In the haste of your flight, maps and books on the Old Realms were tossed to make room for essential supplies. What’s more, this mass arcane aberration seems to have disrupted the collective memory of the survivors. As a result, even the lands you once called home are unfamiliar.

The caravan arrived in the early fall. Without a crop to harvest, you gathered what you could to prepare for the winter. When it came, you huddled around your fire inside your hastily-built mud house. You scraped by on spare oats and the small winter animals that you could catch. All around you, your neighbors succumbed to sickness and starvation. But you held out.

Now that spring has thawed the ice and snow, it’s time for the refugees to repair their homes and sow what few seeds they can. But a different fate awaits you. You feel the call of adventure. What lies within the highlands you’ve found yourselves in? What treasures might be glimmering in dark places? And what is the nature of the arcane aberration that drove you out of your home and into the north?"

- Introductory text from the Old Realms Player's Guide

What is the campaign about?

The Old Realms Campaign is an open-table, old-school roleplaying game using Necrotic Gnome's Old School Essentials ruleset. The characters are among the survivors of an arcane calamity that disrupted their memories and transformed the common creatures of the world into magical aberrations. After fleeing to the northern highlands, the survivors established the settlement of Ram's Horn. The PCs are using the shanty village as their base while they explore the surroundings. 

What were the Old Realms?

The namesake of the campaign refers to the lands from which the survivors fled. They were a collection of closely-related kingdoms and principalities united by a desire for peace and prosperity. They were as follows:  

• Pravdia: a land of rolling hills covered by dense evergreen forests. Pravdians primarily speak Common and Pravdi, their ancestral tongue. Pravdian names are similar to those found in the Czech Republic. 

• Avanolia: the heartland of the Old Realm. Gentle hills, scattered deciduous forests, and grasslands used for farming. European names with a twist.  

• Kezkaza: the western plains region. People here lived a semi-nomadic life. Armenian names. 

• Hiacenia, the Emerald Vales: Dense forested region to the south. Sylvari names. Traditionally, Hiacenians don’t have last names unless they earn them by accomplishing some great feat. 

Other peoples live beyond the borders of the Old Realm, but nobody in the settlement remembers who, what, or where they are.