Dungeons of Dracathen

    For the last year or so, I have been running an open table “West Marches” style campaign using Shadowdark. Its been a fantastic time, forcing me to push myself creatively, hone my skills as a DM, and giving me a chance to hang out with friends from all over this country (and continent!) regularly. I’ve given this campaign a link to my long running DCC game by using the same homebrew setting. Its opened up what was once a small collection of towns I used to string together some of my favorite modules into two continents with a growing shared history. The best part is getting to expand on that collaboratively with two groups of friends.

    Whatever it was in my youth that caused an appetite for rigorously developed settings like Forgotten Realms and Mystara has disappeared with age. While I have enjoyed reading about their mythologies and defining characters, I feel increasingly caged by metaplots and ubiquitous personalities put forth by corporate entities developing “lore”. With a published setting, there is a pressure to adhere to what the people know and expect. There likely are YouTube series and TikTok videos dissecting all the details. The world is largely mapped, making adding a large dungeon somewhere difficult without causing ripples in the goings on of the surrounding area. There was no one with a whip and cattle prod forcing me to slot my imagination into their fictional history textbooks, but it was difficult to silence the nagging voice in the back of my head that, upon writing my plans for the next few games, whispered,

“Does this conform to the canon?”

My last encounter with this was the birth of Dracathen.

    As I am sure it is for any DM reading this, my setting lives and breathes in my brain but much of that has not yet hit pixel or paper. Rather than bore you with my own history textbook brain-dump, here is an excerpt of the introduction I sent my players:

    “For nearly a thousand years, the Empire of Dracathen has been in a dark age. The gluttonous aristocracy's taxes keep peasants impoverished. Famine and drought have ravished the land. All manner of monster encroach on the ragged edges of civilization. The people cry to the heavens for relief and are met with indifference.”

Those five sentences have everything I want Dracathen to be on full display. No one will mistake it for a nice place with happy people who will have a happy ending. Maybe a future post will get into more detail, but for now that’s the medieval hell that serves as the backdrop for my games. The Empire of Dracathen is sprawling. It is primarily human. It is xenophobic. It is theocratic. It is oppressive.

   That intro is how I started my DCC game and everyone immediately got it. The light but flavorful background was working. The game was going well, but I wanted to play more. Children, jobs, and all the other outside forces that keep us from the table as adults made that impossible with the players I had. I started thinking about leveraging the In Rust We Trust discord where all the friends across the country I have made playing wargames live when they are not in my immediate field of view. The release of Shadowdark, a particularly good modernized OSR game, got me off my ass and figuring out how to make this work. My biggest struggle was creating an area where genuine exploration could take place plausibly while inside such an all encompassing empire. Much of my first Dracathen game is structured around a criticism of capitalism and wealth (yes, politics belong in gaming) and I thought it could be interesting to have a game do the same with colonialism. I admittedly have done very little with that concept so far, but that thought is what created the Angstlands.

    I used the same broad strokes as my other game to set the tone, but this was the real birth of any internal history. I captured the premise of the game with this introduction:

    “A century ago, the Empire colonized the sparsely populated continent of Theysia. Its idyllic shores hid unfamiliar dangers that frustrated expansion; a cursed forest, roving bands of savages, and forgotten demigods and their cults. Waging wars on multiple fronts on the mainland, the Emperor was forced to order a retreat. Many were abandoned in the haste to withdraw. The tales soldiers brought home with them quickly spread across the land. The cursed land of Theysia became known as the Angstlands.

    Now, the decades long war in the west has been won. Emperor Wilhelm VII, convinced of Dracathen’s divine right to rule over all, has ordered a return to the Angstlands. Rather than risk another military failure, the Empire looks to explorers and adventurers to scout the land and map its features in return for the right to all spoils recovered. The Fortress of Ulm has been rebuilt and each day desperate people arrive seeking fortune and an escape from the oppressive life on the mainland.”

   Last week, I had a discussion with Rory about DMing this kind of game. I had hoped to write a bit about the challenges of running a 4-6 player game in 2.5 hours and having it feel fulfilling, but this “short” introduction to my games has spiraled into an 800+ word post and I have tortured you enough. We’ll save that one for next time.