The Elatonian Empire
Scope
The motivation behind building The Elatonian Empire
A smaller Gothic world for a smaller scale campaign. An intricate and political gothic fairty tale around a singular nation. The Elatonian Empire will tell the tale of an adventuring group surviving in a cursed nation under tyrannical rule. Will they solve the curse, join the rebellion to overthrow the emperor, or join him in dominating the land.
The goal of the project
A fun and chilling 3-20 campaign
The Elatonian Empire's Unique Selling point
Victorian, Gothic, fairytale setting where death is a constant companion.
Theme
Genre
Finding joy in the darkness, living in the small moments in between the horror. Human nature persevering against the dark and lack of hope. What will people be willing to sacrifice to solve the issues, to defeat the darkness.
Reader Experience
hopefully terrifying, gritty, dark
Reader Tone
Dark, hopeless, gothic
Recurring Themes
Finding joy in the darkness, living in the small moments in between the horror. Human nature persevering against the dark and lack of hope. What will people be willing to sacrifice to solve the issues, to defeat the darkness.
Character Agency
Planning on a lot of agency
Focus
Drama
When The Bone Father perished the Empire was cursed with undeath. Resurrection has become incredibly hard, the components being so sought after they are incredibly rare. Any being who dies will be rise again as horrific undead. The time it takes for them to rise varies so each town has corpse collectors who collect the dead in large caged carts and take them to be burnt. It is not uncommon for travellers and small settlements to be fending off attacks from the undead.
Emperor Aviriol is an old and paranoid recluse. He came into power at the age of nine and spent the first few decades living in decadence while his corrupt advisors ruled the empire in his stead. They brought brutal and vicious people into positions of power and allowed the military and guards to grow corrupt and cruel. They removed the ban on slavery and made it not just legal, but encouraged. They sanctioned that all official healers be under imperial rule, so all the ill and infirm must seek out imperial aid, often being given curative but addictive tonics for their ailments. Tonics they can only get from the empire, this addiction adding yet another layer to imperial control over the populace When Emperor Aviriol finally began to take an interest in ruling the empire was very changed from the near utopia it once was, and under his rule it became worse. The laws have become harsh, the rule has become a tyrannical dictatorship.
As things continued like this the emperor has grown paranoid and reclusive, seeing assassins and monsters around every corner. Insisting that planar creatures haunted his footsteps.
Sightings and attacks from planar beings have increased and rumors of a coming invasion from distant nations and continents have grown rampant. The people of the empire live harsh and fear-filled lives.
The Dragonborn used to hold a place of honor and ranked amongst the nobility, due to the important role dragons played in the planar conquest. They made up the elite of the royal guard and empirical army, and honored position alongside their nobility. The Dragonborn were sworn to serve and defend the empire itself, rather than being sworn to the whomever held the throne. The current regime has ousted the dragonborn, labeling them as traitors to the empire and spreading various forms of propoganda about them. Many dragopnborn were arrested, imprisoned, and enslaved. Others had their titles and wealth stripped as they were banished to peasantry. Now as commoners are prone to random disapearences it is usually dragonborn who vanish first.
Necromancy, once a benign and common practice, is now illegal for all save nobility. Many of the noble families continue the practice, raising forces of undead to serve them and conducting all manor of magical and necrotic experimentation. All under the guise of solving The Child of Bones curse.
It is suspected that the commoners who go missing are often taken for these experiments.
Many of the commoners who go missing will show back up bearing the tattoos of a slave, the official story being they committed some grave offence, the sentence being ensalvement or death. The poeple closest to the enslaved know this to be false.
There is an underground rebellion against the crown, as well as hidden followers of the Child of Bones.