Rise of Drekis: Chapter 2 - Outpost on the Frontier

Hello there Patrons! Let's talk about what's coming up next and take a behind the scenes look at how the sausage gets made.

Mandatory caveats: While things are still in the planning stages, anything can change. I'm going to paint you a picture of where I expect to be, but expectations may not match reality.

The Idea
Assuming Feyama's character, Elaine Pentalin, survives and is received back home with honors, she will be setting out on another voyage to another land, but this time with more PCs! Her next mission will be to Outpost Santa Barbara to figure out what happened to that colony.

You see, during the war, contact was lost with the outpost. With the outpost having little immediate value, and much bigger problems closer to home, Drekis let the issue go until the war was over. Now that the war is over, it's time to figure out what happened to that trading post. Is it destroyed? Overrun by locals? Did Mistrya conquer it during the war and it is now their last bastion of strength? Our PCs will arrive on a ship, with some soldiers, and bring the Outpost back into the fold, or gather as much information as they can and beat a retreat.

Picking the right campaign
If Chapter 1 was dealing with the internal power struggle of the Kingdom turning into Empire, Chapter 2 is dealing with the first steps of becoming an empire: Gobbling up any territory that could be reasonably regarded as "lost". There are a few candidates for this story line:

• Wake County
• Gade Isle
• Whiteshore
• Hemdorkas Hills
• G.N.O.M.E.
• Outpost Santa Barbara

Claims to Territory
Wake County, Gade Isle, Whiteshore, and the Hemdorkas Hills are all part of former Eridon. The plan here is to put a King on the throne of Eridon, and then lend Drekisian forces to the Eridonian king to retake any parts that are currently in "rebellion".

G.N.O.M.E is a former territory of Drekis - technically a current territory. Once upon a time someone conquered the Gnomish Nation of Mighty Engineers and attempted to tax, govern, and defend it. But there were problems. The Tinker Gnomes that live there are culturally difficult to deal with. No one's fault, and no shame to anyone, but it turns out that Tinker Gnomes are actually quite irritating socially to Drekisians. Not dangerous, just very stressful and agitating to be around. Taxes were difficult to extract because each individual gnome lived such a diverse and varied life that the paperwork and effort to figure out what everyone owed accurately was very time consuming and expensive for relatively little gains. Governance over the gnomes required a lot of communicating with difficult people over lots of technical topics, and the gnomes had a lot of questions and hypotheticals. The island was also home to a green dragon, and after a few attempts to dislodge the beast all hope of controlling the island was given up. After 3 appointed governors retired at early ages to live in the country, attempts to exert the laws of Drekis were surrendered and the governance on the island quickly lost purpose when it was discovered that if you just left the gnomes alone they readily accepted the idea of a "regulatory fee". They were in-fact so accepting of the idea that Drekis abandoned all settlement of the island and simply collected taxes once a year. Tax collection was such an unpleasant job that internal friction pushed the collection rate out to once every two years, collecting two years of taxes at a time. When this worked fine, it was pushed to every 3 years. Then every 4 years. By 20 years of conquest, taxes were only being collected every 5 years - which proved devastating to the local gnomish economy. The effort of collection grew, which made collection more time consuming and more expensive, which made profits decrease and internal strife arise. The King of Drekis at the time told the gnomes that they would be back again in 5 years to collect the next set of taxes, but it was inconvenient that year because of a national emergency relating to the arrival of dozens of brass dragons. The year after that the King died. The next year the government was still restabilizing, and by the following year the taxation of G.N.O.M.E. was happily not brought up because nobody wanted to go and do the damned thing. There's been no formal acknowledgement of seceding the territory or of an independence movement. It was just an unpleasant relationship that Drekis ghosted the gnomes on.

Outpost Santa Barbara is a proper Drekisian colony with which contact has been lost. The claim here is pretty straight forward.

Wake County
The story here would have been one of outright war. Wake County has been building its independence and drilling with a professional army for 6 years while making huge profits off all sides in the War for Arcadia. This is not a story that does well for a group of PCs since it would be all mass combat, and while a whole mini campaign of mass combat sounds like it could be fun if done right, there's not much storytelling or RP to such a campaign.

Gade Isle
What has been happening on Gade Isle is some super interesting stuff, and I thought it was surely going to be featured in one of our chapters. Undead armies of the dark forest mixed would be a wonderful place to showcase the fallout of Light of Illumis (making all undead take damage every round in sunlight). But the necromancer that lives there is so strong that I think this level of event would be taken care of by only the most powerful of NPCs, and I want a break from the high level content for a while. There's also room for a short story of the first party sent there to find out what's going on only to realize the horrors of the woods, but the survival chances are so low I would feel bad sending PCs into a doomed situation - especially because for it to work well they would have to believe from the get go that it was possible and then be met with overwhelmingly impossible odds. That's a good way to burn trust with your players.

Whiteshore
This is actually a really great place to tell this story! Low-Mid level characters. Dealing with local politics, dealing with a hierarchical group of goblins who can be defeated/scattered when a boss is slain. Mysteries of the Shadow Mountains. Chapter 1 touches on the events of Whiteshore already, and I want to spread the stories to different corners, so doing another story in this area felt a little cramped.  Let's see more of the empire.

Hemdorkas Hills
This territory was claimed by the dwarves who live there, and they shut themselves inside the earth. We could turn this into a pretty cool dungeon campaign, fighting for control of the major cities - but that's not how this story goes. Drekis doesn't try to assimilate the dwarven lands through force. With the dwarves, they're playing the long game. Olive branch now, I recognize your independence, but I'm your major, bordering on only, trading partner. If you would like to join the empire, there are major advantages, but we make no claim on your lands or people. One day they'll come around. Dislodging the creatures by force would be extremely costly.

G.N.O.M.E.
No thank you

Outpost Santa Barbara
I'll leave the story to the campaigning, but this has just about everything I would want, with the exception of a finished map.

Gameplay and Casting Details
3 PCs would be perfect for this campaign. One will be Kel Pentalin, one will be a rogue, and one will be a caster of Kel Pentalin's choice. They will additionally have some number of soldiers under their command to help hold the territory if and when they retake it. Might be the surviving troops from Chapter 1.

Our cast is likely going to be Feyama, TrumpSC, and an unknown 3rd. Still looking for the right person.

I'm designing overlays tonight, and still need to find an artist to make them. If you have any suggestions for overlay artists, please leave them in the comments!

Sessions will tentatively be on Fridays at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern / 7pm CET - but this might move an hour. There's no start date yet, but it is possible that this chapter might end up starting after Chapter 3.

Official and final announcements will come when the details are ironed out. 

Lastly, thank you for all of your support. These campaigns are made possible by viewers like you. ♥

gl hf
Koibu