Topic: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

I have some vague ideas crawling around my head about a potential setting for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess (Grindhouse Edition) game. Unlike my previous, wilderness-centric D&D settings, this setting will be urban, and with a somewhat more advanced technology than usual D&D, to follow LotFP's Renaissance atmosphere. Inspiration would be Lovecraft's works, Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World saga (to a small degree) and my second favorite computer game ever* Thief: Dark Project.

I'm undecided yet between a small-town setting and a big city setting, though I'm leaning towards the former for a more flavorful setting with strong NPC personalities, as well as a fully-detailed dungeon under the town. But I'm open to suggestions nonetheless.

The town would be situated on the shores of an ocean, with the old town originally built on a cliff, and the newer quarters growing around the docks below it. The town is past its prime, with many crumbling buildings in the Old Quarter and with rife crime in the Docks and a lot of filth spewed into the air by the new Manufacturing Quarter. The kingdom to which the town belongs is in bade shape (my initial thought was something along the lines of a shaky, corrupt restoration of monarchy after a revolution and a bloody civil war), and the roads inland are not very safe.

There is intense rivalry between the town's old nobility, the descendants of seafarers of old, and the newer and wealthier merchant and manufacturing barons. There are rumors about the old nobility being involved in unwholesome sorcery, while the old nobility views the rising merchant class as a group of rootless upstart with no real legacy.

The big secret is that the old nobility in the town are Sea Blood (as in Realms of Crawling Chaos) - they have been inter-breeding with Deep Ones from time immemorial. This is only fully known to the elders of the old noble families, with the truth kept in the shadows from the younger nobles. Those of noble blood have some sorcerous abilities, are long-lived and become deformed as their age; but the sorcery is attributed to a long tradition of magecraft, and the deformities to inbreeding, and many lesser members of the noble families don't know much about their heritage until they reach an advanced age (if at all).

PCs could play characters of Noble Blood. This will be a custom class which would replace the Elf, and have Magic-User spells instead of the RoCC Sea Blood's Clerical spells. Their XP progression would probably be faster than the elves', with the catch that they'll become deformed over time. Of course, Noble Blooded PCs won't know about their true nature until they reach a high level... And then, they'll be in for a nasty surprise!

There would be no Elves in this setting. Dwarves, however, will exist as Duergar, or the Elders, a dying race which has predated Man and is now being usurped by Humanity (actually they're an evolutionary offshoot of the Neanderthals who took refuge underground when most of their race died), and use the LotFP Dwarf stat.

Comments would be welcome.

* My all-time favorite computer game is the original System Shock. My 3rd favorite is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Last edited by golan2072 (2011-05-16 15:03:47)

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

An inspiring idea. I'd go with a small Town vibe as well.

"Translating" Innsmouth would be a very good starting point. You'll have no shortage of NPCs for your setting. In fact every other Lovercraftian town (Arkham, Kingsport...) could be used as well.  Turning the Miskatonic university in a kind of medieval university could be nice... ("We want to fund an expedition to the far north...").

Even if it's a little more over the top, the Freeport City guide from Green Ronin could be a good source of inspiration as well.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

If you are planning urban adventures, Vornheim is AWESOME for it.  I ran adventures in a small town of 1300 and it was very useful.  Some of the encounters and random tables will definitely need to be tweaked for your purposes, but many of the concepts are universal.

Dennis Higgins, The Higgipedia.
So mellow, he's probably not REALLY a grognard.

Check out Gaming All Over The Place: http://gamingallover.blogspot.com/

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

A university would be a great idea - especially an ancient one with many secrets - but would it fit a small town (say, population around 5,000) well? If not, I might try a monastery, as some monastic orders could be quite scholarly.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

Yes the university would be based in another, bigger town.

For your smalltown, I'd try to answer the following questions :

Is the nobility fortune declining ? Why ? (Another seashore town became the commerce hub for the area, so less and less ships stop by...)

If the town is past its prime how did the merchants got wealthier ? (The uncanny ability of local fisherman to fish huge quantities of fish... Thanks to an old promise made by the town's nobility  ?)

Or maybe the town could reflect that : a new town, made of factories, inhabited by a poorly paid workforce, slowly starting to flourish. An old town, ruled by the nobility, where most of the fishermen live.

My two cents...

Last edited by Kobayashi (2011-05-17 14:40:09)

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

Kobayashi wrote:

Or maybe the town could reflect that : a new town, made of factories, inhabited by a poorly paid workforce, slowly starting to flourish. An old town, ruled by the nobility, where most of the fishermen live.

Exactly.

The older part of the town, based on fishing and smaller-scale coastal trade, is declining. The newer parts of the town, composed of factories, is badly constructed and has a very impoverished population of industrial workers, but is slowly becoming a boom-town, especially due to a new, nearby iron mine and a new shipyard. Of course, the industrialists and bankers are now making a fortune... Unlike the old nobility, and their traditional fishermen subjects, who are way past their prime.

Also, new fishing methods, employed elsewhere, have lowered the price of fish and reduced the advantage the town had in terms of fishing yields.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

Also, don't forget the economic effects of the Revolution and the Restoration that followed.

Restoring itself to power had cost the monarchy a huge amount of money, and the King is deep in debts to several kingdom-level bankers. This has three main effects. First, the kingdom-level bankers have HUGE amounts of capital to invest in various ventures (industry, long-range trade, the sheep and wool business). Second, the bankers make sure that the heavy taxes, levied to pay back their loans, fall on the commoners, and part of the nobility's income (the nobles can keep much less of the taxes they gather as they have to give more to the King) and not on their new investments (merchant ships, sheep farms, factories). Third, as many nobles drive off their serfs to replace traditional agriculture with the more profitable sheep raising, the towns and cities are now full of cheap, non-guild labor provided by displaced peasants.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

To elaborate, there are two major plot lines I'm thinking of.

The first revolves around the dark secrets of the old nobility of the coastal region (not just the town), called the Captains, which is known as the best fishery in the kingdom. The reason for this is that the the Captains, in their distant past, have made a pact with the Sea Devils (AKA Deep Ones), allowing them to cross-breed with the noble families (and giving them the occasional human sacrifice) in return for vast fishing yields as well as sorcerous knowledge. Older members of the Captains' families have 'the look', and even older ones "are buried in the sea" (actually go to the sea to become Sea Devils).

There are many ways the PCs could tumble upon these dark secrets. Of course, a noble-born PC would not know of his/her true heritage, but will learn of quite disturbing clues about his/her family's past; when he/she will start developing deformations and having dreams about going to the sea and worshiping Dagon, he/she might want to investigate. Alternatively, the PC(s) might inherit an old sea-side manor of one of the Captains... Barring a noble-born PC, there would still be kidnapping in the town (cultists gathering human sacrifices for the Sea Devils), as well as rumors of VAST wealth buried underneath the Captains' manors in the Old Quarter...

The second involves sandbox-style factional struggle within the town. You have the Captains against the new industrialists; the Thief's Guild against the Watch; workers' struggle against the industrialists and the horrible conditions at the manufacturies; the Circle of the Just (anti-monarchist revolutionaries) against the Captains and the King's gendarmes; the Church against the new Academics (some of which are M-Us); and so on. The PCs could choose to side with a faction and help it against its enemies.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

Wow, way to kick off the Gamer ADD, Omer.  Thanks for nothing!  tongue

Seriously though, these ideas could be an awesome campaign idea.  I have all the Lovecraft Country books from Chaosium (Return to Dunwich, Arkham, Kingsport and Innsmouth) and they make a nifty "Call of Cthulhu sandbox".

So how awesome would it be to reskin those from early 20th century to the Renaissance, and have the group tooling around Renaissance versions of Kingsport (The Terrible Old Man, The Festival), Arkham (Dreams in the Witch House... has a familiar ring to it, that one does...) and of course, Dunwich.  ACK, I'll need to write a gamer ADD blog post just to get this out of my head so I don't keep thinking about it.

Anyway, I'll visit back and see how to kick in ideas from time to time.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

Beedo wrote:

o how awesome would it be to reskin those from early 20th century to the Renaissance, and have the group tooling around Renaissance versions of Kingsport (The Terrible Old Man, The Festival), Arkham (Dreams in the Witch House... has a familiar ring to it, that one does...) and of course, Dunwich.

Exactly, I have to reread some old Cthulhu scenarios as well. Escape from Innsmouth would make a great module.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

I am considering a potential twist on this.

What if instead of a coastal town with Deep-One-blooded nobility and dying Duergar, there would be a tropical (or swamp?) town with Serpent-Men-blooded nobility and wild Lizard-Men who were once the Serpent-Men's slaves until the Serpent-Men empire collapsed and Man has ascended? This might be less predictable than the Insmouth plot, and the Serpent-Men blood does carry a lot of sorcery... Underneath the town, there would be the long-forgotten warrens of the old Serpent-Men settlement full of sourcerous wonders and horrors...

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

That would work very well, with a small touch of Bayou in the mix...

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

Hmmm... Which cultural motifs will fit it well? For the Insmouth-equivalent I've been intended to use British motifs, but this would probably need different ones.

As for the lost Serpent-Men civilization, I'm thinking of using Mesoamerican (Aztec?) motifs for them; the Lizard-Men would still have cults making human sacrifices to the Feathered Serpent...

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

That could work very well, I'd go with a Cajun. Native american ancestors, 6000 years old tribes, lots of alligators..., depraved nobility with a french accent ^o^

But the Aztecs make for a more "visual" reference to most players. For the cultural motifs maybe something close to the spanish colonisation of South America.

Re: A Seaside Town with Sea-Blooded Nobility

My current thoughts are tending towards a 250-years-old colonial town built over Serpentmen ruins. The Old Nobility - descendants of the first explorers and conquerors - had intermixed with the remaining Serpentmen and thus acquire their looks as they grow in power and/or as they age, and they have also inherited their sorcerous abilities. The native Lizardmen were once the slaves of the Serpentmen, but have rebelled and destroyed most of their former masters a long time (say, 300-500 years) before the arrival of the foreign colonialists. Most Lizardmen follow their own totem spirits, but a few still secretly worship their former masters and make Lizardman (or human!) sacrifice to the Feathered Serpent.

The new Merchants have recently arrived from the Old World with a lot of capital and new know-how, and are trying to grab the local economy.