Impromptu Campaign Primer

I wrote this yesterday in response to a player wanting to learn more about our campaign setting. Up until now I have been drip-feeding little details about the goings-on of the world, but as we're nearing our 40th session I realized it was past time to make a piece of writing that ties them all together. For my sake, it was nice to finally get off my ass and consolidate the key setting points that until now existed mercurially in my mind or accumulated in overburdened docs. 

Normally I'd want to dress a campaign primer up with some artful prose. I imagine Nevelorn in shades teal and violet and midnight blue, populated with wispy brushstroke Amano people. The emotional register varies between the wryness of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance and the melancholia of M. John Harrison. In my vision, the sky is always just after sunset, the fields always windswept, and the woods rendered in watercolor like those '70s Lord of the Rings forest illustrations with black space surrounding by emerald foliage. I want what I write about Nevelorn to convey not just the entirety of this sentiment, but the magnitude of emotional meanings which may only be evoked indirectly. 

But, seeing as it has been two and a half years since our first session and that hasn't happened, it's clear quick and dirty is the form the primer is meant to take.

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The area the game takes place in is called NEVELORN, The Land of the Long Dusk. To the south and east is the Bleak Sea, to the west are the Barbarian Kingdoms, and to the north are the Mountains of Mourning, beyond which monstrous warlords and vile sorcerers fight endlessly over the trippy expanse of the Frayed Lands. Rising above the Many-Colored Moors on the southeast coast is the city of Nisk. A place of black teeth and stone spires, knives hidden in daylight and strange things looming in alleys. Ruthless in its decadence, sophisticated in its squalor, Nisk is a wonderful, horrible, dizzying city where any adventurer can feel at home.

The deal with Nevelorn is that it used to be great but a series of overlapping conflicts known as the Seven Wars led to total, cataclysmic collapse—to the majority of the population, the Seven War period was indistinguishable from an apocalypse. The old order of kings and knights died, and now people find what safety they can in rugged, disconnected settlements. Monsters and brigands stalk the wilderness. The roads are no longer safe to walk, though some, like the wardens of the Holy Fortress and the Violet Knights of Lord Ulrum, seek to maintain some semblance of order in the territory they claim.

The current "big deal" things going on in Nevelorn your character knows about: 

• Nevelorn is slowly dying. Not the towns or polities, but the land itself. The spirits of nature are forsaking their station, and in their absence the protective boundary between this world and the unseen realms beyond grows weak. The primordial shrines must be restored for the spirits to return. 
• Rumors speak of a horrifying monster known as the Tirapheg roaming the countryside. As tall as a watchtower, with five heads, three arms, and three legs sharing a single body. As it walks its shadow persists like a trail of paint left by a brush. And from it's shadow, phantoms spill forth, whispering the tongue of Old Zenon. The Mentaculate, a group of wizards who have taken control of the city of Velaine, will pay a bounty to anyone who slays it; the number climbs and climbs, as if they were desperate...  
• Hobgoblins are colonizing Nevelorn. They have landed on the Seething Coast to the south and are turning entire towns into freaky nightmare labor camps.  

There's a bunch of other stuff going on, this is just what I have time to write during my lunch break. 

Darkmantles

Chthonic squid monsters floating soundlessly through the Inverted Palace. Conical indigo bodies ringed with crimson eyes; dense membrane webbing chitin-barbed tentacles. In sharp contrast to their gloomy exterior, a darkmantle's underside is a riot of flaming, ghastly hues. 

Darkmantles hover ominously in corridors or high above spacious chambers until they detect the mental thrum of potential prey. They dart through the air with surprising speed and latch themselves to a victim, engulfing their head and upper torso in membranous embrace. 

While attached, a darkmantle shoots slender dendron-shaped tendrils into the nose and ears of the victim to hijack their synapses while a subliminally active display pulses across their ventral surface, psychically imprinting an egg in the victim's mental substrate. During this process, the darkmantle will defend itself and the victim by lashing at oncoming threats with its tentacles.

HD 4+1 AC 5 Att. Engulf, Tentacle x 4 (1d6) Move: 180'(60') fly Morale: 7 Alignment: Chaotic Number Appearing: 1d3

• Engulf: engulfed creatures can move but not see or attack. They must save vs. spells each round to mentally resist the darkmantle's egg. A helmet grants +2 to the save, and a Helmet of Telepathy grants +4. Once attached, a darkmantle only removes itself if it dies, loses morale, or successfully implants an egg. Half the damage inflicted on a darkmantle is dealt the engulfed creature. 
• Psionic occlusion: Darkmantles project a nimbus of psychic noise that makes their presence difficult to comprehend. They surprise on a 4:6 and cannot be targeted by spells or missile attack from a range greater than 30'.

A darkmantle egg is fertilized by the background memories of its host. A day after implantation, incidental or intentional attempts to access deep-seated memories result in nothing more than darkness and nauseating anxiety—the remains of the victim's subconscious has cordoned off the parts of the mind parasitized by a gestating alien psyche. Player characters lose any skills, features, or characteristics related to their background (e.g., a character who used to be a deep sea diver or basket weaver or circus performer is no better at diving or weaving or performing than an average person. No class abilities are lost). 

After 3 months of dreamless sleep and forgetting what you were doing the moment you walk into a room, the larval darkmantle hatches from its egg and chews a hole through your mind directly into the Nightmare Dimension, where it matures before making it's way back into the Prime Material Plane by way of the mythic underworld. This is by all accounts worse than having a creature physical burst through your brain, but the result is the same: the character is out of the game. 

Because darkmantle eggs are parasitic psychological phenomena and not physical objects, they can only be excised by effects that target the mind. Downtime research will yield three such cases: one of the sorceress Ganavel who cleared the egg from her psyche by converting it into a spell and casting it, another of a nameless psionic warrior of the Seven War period who neutralized his egg with PSI bombardments, and a third of the ancient poet Eio Ei, who counter-parasitized the nascent darkmantle when he sublimated the alien presence into a lyric poem. He saved himself from the egg, but was slain in the riot that followed the first and only performance of his opus. One copy remains in the Palace Archives—Hearing it while implanted inspires the same integration with the darkmantle that saved the poet, though a listener without such an affliction will be driven insane. 

Darkmantle eggs may also be removed through a highly experimental procedure involving accessing the brain via trepanation, treating it with Oil of Etherealness, and then casting a spell of Cure Disease. The procedure is practiced by She of Limpid Mercy and the vicar-surgeons of the Hall of Contrition in exchange for a modest donation, but you have to provide your own oil.