A
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition
game, focusing on storytelling, accessibility, and player agency, set in a "sandbox"
environment using by Zak Smith a.k.a. Zak Sabbath. (That link is to a review which contains plenty of in-depth analysis, but also some spoilers and information that player characters wouldn't necessarily have.) The setting is a wonderfully crazy mashup of Dracula's Transylvania and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
, among other things...Spoiler: VOIVODJA - The Slow War
In green Voivodja, Vlad Vortigen dreamt a castle to cover his kingdom; to keep away the sun, and goblins, and to move his plants closer to the rain. Parlors, pantries, long halls and gardens with great wrought gates athwart each other in stacked profusion; observatories and aviaries and zoos, oubliettes and minarets, seraglios, saunas and music rooms, a fortress of infinite leisure multiplying out from the Terrible Goblin Wood to the vast Carpathians, its sub-basements reaching deep into the strata of the Earth and the Earth’s many dungeons.
One day, like all things, it fell.
Did the
Due to the distortions of time, space, memory, and communication that surround and suffuse the country, no-one even pretends to know if they have been fighting for three years or two hours, or forever. We know only that there is war, and that what once was Voivodja is now the Place of Unreason. The land is still hidden from the West by the
For not only has every kind of creation and creature been abused by the blasphemies and sorceries of the unfathomable war, but every force, law, lesson and explanation ever decreed by those above and those beneath. Meaning is meaningless and there are never any reasons. There are, however, monsters you can kill, some of whom have stuff.
The war itself is played on weird terms, as the belligerent monarchs and their thrall armies are mostly vampires, all therefore unable to cross the rivers with which their region is densely latticed. In addition to the traditional tools of all slow wars: sabotage, stealth, subterfuge, catspaw and intrigue, both armies make extensive use of networks of linked interiors— tunnels and irrational portals left over from the Once Palace, moving from room to lonely room like rats in plumbing, eventually emerging miles away, ready to bring battle to the open gardens in the bleak red night.
One day, like all things, it fell.
Did the
Once Palace
of the Red King, Vlad Vortigen, fall to Elizabeth Bathyscape, now called The Heart Queen
, the Decapitator of the North? We don’t know. Some say they were lovers, some father and daughter, some court rivals, some rival devils, some bitter, dying demons who awoke already foes in the early hours of the very first morning.Due to the distortions of time, space, memory, and communication that surround and suffuse the country, no-one even pretends to know if they have been fighting for three years or two hours, or forever. We know only that there is war, and that what once was Voivodja is now the Place of Unreason. The land is still hidden from the West by the
Terrible Goblin Wood
, still hidden from the East by the Carpathian Mountains
, and now from the gods by the gods’ own disgust.For not only has every kind of creation and creature been abused by the blasphemies and sorceries of the unfathomable war, but every force, law, lesson and explanation ever decreed by those above and those beneath. Meaning is meaningless and there are never any reasons. There are, however, monsters you can kill, some of whom have stuff.
The war itself is played on weird terms, as the belligerent monarchs and their thrall armies are mostly vampires, all therefore unable to cross the rivers with which their region is densely latticed. In addition to the traditional tools of all slow wars: sabotage, stealth, subterfuge, catspaw and intrigue, both armies make extensive use of networks of linked interiors— tunnels and irrational portals left over from the Once Palace, moving from room to lonely room like rats in plumbing, eventually emerging miles away, ready to bring battle to the open gardens in the bleak red night.
Spoiler: VOIVODJA - The Land Now
Imagine you are looking down at a map, or at the land with a satellite eye.
Imagine a grid or lattice laid over the land. The graph paper lines are rivers and hedgerows, narrow as alleyways, running at angles, defining squares the size of city blocks. Now build, in your mind, tall buildings of different heights up from these neighboring square foundations: one big skyscraper in each— in stone and in a medieval style, some ten, some twenty stories high. Give them gardens on their roofs and across their terraced balconies. Now link
them with bridges. Now destroy them with time.
Some tumble, some crumble, some rot, some have four stories or five, some are half-left, some are squat, some are flat, some are holes in the ground, exposing the corridors under the Earth’s surface. The remnants of the gardens spread over it all like a moss— or the icing on a cake the day after the party— coating the land’s rainward face in a mask of friendly green, with the occasional window, door or rabbit-hole poking through, allowing access to the dungeony layers of the interior.
Some say it looks like a house of cards made with too many decks laid out on a chessboard made with too many squares. It’s all covered in grass and dotted with blood.
The practical point is: it’s all in squares now. The squares have names— Queen’s Bishop 706 or King’s Slaughter 9— though nowadays, considering the number of foreigners, it’s become much more fashionable to say 1 dash 17, 1 dash 2, 9 dash 3, 56 dash 67 etc. As in: “I am in Square 67 dash 44 and the experience appalls me beyond anything in my experience”.
The maddest mapmakers add a third dimension, describing how high or low a floor is by saying: Toad, Pig, Wolf, Stag, Crow etc. (so the second floor of a building in the ninth square away from the Queen’s castle might be Queen’s Rook 9 Pig) and how far beneath it is, saying: Worm, Mole, Pike, Loach, Cod, etc.— though this is even more hopeless, since even children know the floors go down forever into the artificial gigadungeon called the Earth, and, besides, physical location in Voivodja, especially indoors, is all equivocal.
While your author hopes the aforementioned goes some way toward explaining the strange signs one sometimes sees in hallways or forgotten parlors (“King’s Treacle-Well 156 Goby”) you do not need to master Voivodjan Notation to navigate or describe the Place of Unreason and, due to its endemic distortions of time and space, the best instructions for getting anywhere (especially in the interiors) read more like recipes.
For example, if someone said “Start in square 15 dash 87. Climb 16 feet down into the crocodile pit, find the rectangular window, climb through it. Walk an even number of steps or until you see something orange, drink the blood of a mother or small ape, walk in any direction at any speed for nine minutes, strike the gazebo, then sleep. When you awake you’ll be in the Virgin’s Pantry,” then they would be telling the truth, and describing the most reliable route.
By these unusual means do the forces of the Heart Queen of in the north, and the thralls of the Red King, in in the south, prosecute enigmatic war throughout the melancholy remnants of the kingdom-sized Once Palace.
Imagine a grid or lattice laid over the land. The graph paper lines are rivers and hedgerows, narrow as alleyways, running at angles, defining squares the size of city blocks. Now build, in your mind, tall buildings of different heights up from these neighboring square foundations: one big skyscraper in each— in stone and in a medieval style, some ten, some twenty stories high. Give them gardens on their roofs and across their terraced balconies. Now link
them with bridges. Now destroy them with time.
Some tumble, some crumble, some rot, some have four stories or five, some are half-left, some are squat, some are flat, some are holes in the ground, exposing the corridors under the Earth’s surface. The remnants of the gardens spread over it all like a moss— or the icing on a cake the day after the party— coating the land’s rainward face in a mask of friendly green, with the occasional window, door or rabbit-hole poking through, allowing access to the dungeony layers of the interior.
Some say it looks like a house of cards made with too many decks laid out on a chessboard made with too many squares. It’s all covered in grass and dotted with blood.
The practical point is: it’s all in squares now. The squares have names— Queen’s Bishop 706 or King’s Slaughter 9— though nowadays, considering the number of foreigners, it’s become much more fashionable to say 1 dash 17, 1 dash 2, 9 dash 3, 56 dash 67 etc. As in: “I am in Square 67 dash 44 and the experience appalls me beyond anything in my experience”.
The maddest mapmakers add a third dimension, describing how high or low a floor is by saying: Toad, Pig, Wolf, Stag, Crow etc. (so the second floor of a building in the ninth square away from the Queen’s castle might be Queen’s Rook 9 Pig) and how far beneath it is, saying: Worm, Mole, Pike, Loach, Cod, etc.— though this is even more hopeless, since even children know the floors go down forever into the artificial gigadungeon called the Earth, and, besides, physical location in Voivodja, especially indoors, is all equivocal.
While your author hopes the aforementioned goes some way toward explaining the strange signs one sometimes sees in hallways or forgotten parlors (“King’s Treacle-Well 156 Goby”) you do not need to master Voivodjan Notation to navigate or describe the Place of Unreason and, due to its endemic distortions of time and space, the best instructions for getting anywhere (especially in the interiors) read more like recipes.
For example, if someone said “Start in square 15 dash 87. Climb 16 feet down into the crocodile pit, find the rectangular window, climb through it. Walk an even number of steps or until you see something orange, drink the blood of a mother or small ape, walk in any direction at any speed for nine minutes, strike the gazebo, then sleep. When you awake you’ll be in the Virgin’s Pantry,” then they would be telling the truth, and describing the most reliable route.
By these unusual means do the forces of the Heart Queen of
Castle Cachtice
Castle Poenari
Spoiler: VOIVODJA - Map
Spoiler: With Regard To Unearthed Arcana
I am often inclined to rule in favor of including Unearthed Arcana material because I like the variety it brings and I enjoy sharing playtesting information with others. For those who do not know of or have not heard of Unearthed Arcana, they are a series of articles released by the Dungeons & Dragons publisher providing new content for 5E D&D. Everything from tweaks to races and classes to new creatures to whole new systems of play or campaign settings. All of it is experimental and sometimes fun to play with. The mass combat article will definitely be useful for players to check out at some point during this game...
Phew! That's a lot, but that's it! If you are interested please send me a private message or post in this thread. I would prefer some kind of substantial post instead of just "ego" (I love bookmarking things and I don't know why others do not), and I will start putting things together as soon as I have 3 to 6 people committed.