The Border City
A City, a Forest, and a Treaty That Was a Lie
This is a live tabletop campaign. We play online, about every other week, and run Level Up: Advanced 5e. The setting is homebrew.
The city is Westmarch — the Border City, twenty-odd thousand people on the western edge of the kingdom, where the farmland stops and the Thornwood begins. The western wall has no gate; that was on purpose. Three hundred years ago the kingdom fought the forest to a standstill in the Green War and signed the Greenwood Pact, and for three centuries the Pact has held: the city stays out of the deep woods, the forest stays out of the city, and the Rangers of the Green walk the line between.
That is the story every child in Westmarch is taught. The party has since found the parts that were left out.
Where the campaign is
It started with fog. One morning a cold grey mist rolled out of the Thornwood and drowned the Warrens, the poorest district, and people who stayed in it too long went missing or started walking west toward the trees. Four strangers went into it to pull people out, and came back up through the sewers having found a great carved stone under the city, cracked open on purpose, with tool marks on it.
Following that stone took them a week's march into the forest to the Singing Pools and a fey lady who knew more than she would say, to the ruin of Harrow Keep and the kobolds who worship a dragon, and back again with the thing that mended the stone and a letter that proved the Green War was never won. Then the Duke dismissed his guards and told them the rest of it himself.
The fog is gone. The party took the Duke's service and a house with a red door, and their first real errand was to find a city that has been lost for three hundred years. They found it. Nine days up the Westrun, past a knight of the fey court and a troll at an old ford, they came out on a riverbank and looked across at Celindara: terraces cut into a cliff, a road in five switchbacks, towers with their tops fallen in, and something large that flies. They have climbed the road, put a house's dead back to rest, taken its gold and its ledger, and been counted and challenged in Elvish by a thing that holds the city and did not show itself. It let them stay.
Party level 4. It is Budding 19th, in the year 1247, and the party is on the clifftop of a city no one has entered in three hundred years.
Start here
The Campaign Diary — the story so far, told in order. The recent nights are written up from the recordings; the earlier ones are set down as faithfully as the notes allow. What was found, what was said, and what it cost.
The Player's Wiki — the reference. The party, the city, the people, the forest, what the party has pieced together about the Pact and the stones, and an honest list of what it still does not understand. Nothing in it the characters have not seen, been told, or worked out.
The Journey Rules — how travel into the Thornwood is played. The day cycle, the two dice rolled in the open, pace and distance, journey activities, and what putting somebody on Scout duty actually buys you.
The party
| Who | Heritage | Class | What they do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quill | Fey (Sprite) | Wizard | A four-inch archivist who can fly and freeze a room solid. Forgets his whole life every two years and works from a letter he doesn't remember writing |
| Kaelen Vale | Half-Elf | Ranger of the Green | Sworn to serve both city and forest. The scout, and the one the forest keeps talking to |
| Lyrique | Elf | Bard | The party's face. Sings at an exclusive house in Northbank and moves in Lord Brennan's circle |
| Thalia | Halfling | Rogue | Former City Watch investigator, let go for asking too many questions. Knows the Warrens and its taverns |
| Drakov | Dragonborn | Cleric of Bahamut | Came as Lady Sera's bodyguard and stayed. Heals first, worries later |
Two more travel with them: Wynn Copper, a Delver's Guild fighter hired for the front line, and Lady Sera Westmarch, the Duke's daughter and heir — now forbidden the forest, and no longer taking no for an answer at home. Sammael, a Warrens investigator who went into the fog with them that first morning, was there for the early days; his player has since moved on.
How it plays
The city gets as much table time as the forest. Whole evenings go on a dinner in Northbank, a smith's bench in the Warrens, and a bowl of water on a windowsill nobody can explain.
Investigation over swordwork. The campaign is built on questions — who was in the sewers before the fog, why the treaty leaves no record of itself, what a fey lady meant when she said the bargain is unbalanced. Fights happen, and they have been close: Quill has been dropped more nights than anyone. But the story turns on what the party asks and who they decide to trust.
The recordings are the record. Sessions are recorded and transcribed per speaker, so the diary can quote what was actually said. Where a scene predates the recordings, the diary says so and keeps to what can honestly be established.
Two of them are locals. Kaelen grew up on the edge of the woods and his father still lives there; Thalia walked a Watch beat in the Warrens. When the fog took the poor district, it took their neighbours.
What the party is carrying
An oath to a Duke that is not magically binding, and a house on Redbird Street with a key each. A repaired stone under the Warrens and the knowledge that six more like it stand unseen around the city. A letter, three hundred years old, that says the Green War was lost, not won. A dead ranger's medallion. A name — Rowan Redd — bought from a criminal ledger with a favour not yet called in. A primer on the language of magic, an elven house-book, and a hundred pounds of gold stamped with the mark of a dead city. And a word the war's defenders used for whatever was controlling the forest, which the party heard for the first time on a terrace in Celindara: the Greenheart.
The forest is an old thing, and the Duke says it is awake.