Ever since playing Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I’ve been itching to run a scenario set against the backdrop of a bitter raging continental war, with the spotlight away from the battle action and on the casualties of destruction left in its wake.
A one-shot at the end of last year with my occasional home group threw up a chance to test the premise using Conspiracy of Shadows, a character-driven horror fantasy game that’s been waiting patiently for me for the best part of a decade. After playtesting and tweaking, I’m offering this up for Seven Hills: Far Frontiers.
Scenario: Blight on This Land
System: Conspiracy of Shadows
Players: 3-4
Slot: Sun 25 March, 2:30pm – 6pm
Description:
A swashbuckling quest for hope and renewal, in a world of dark fantasy horror.
A blight has swept across the land. Crops have failed. Livestock have fallen.
Where villages once stood are now silent wastelands. Towns that are not deserted are diseased.
Your families are dead. Your people, the Sarl – last of the Old Faith – are all but wiped out.
For your dying culture, there is but one final hope. It is said it springs eternal in the fertile soils of the distant Earth Mother’s heartland.
Go there, now, and return before the Festival of Rising.
Characters: Hope for the Sarl rests in the hands of:
- Boryslaw / Kasia – a nervous missionary, shouldering the burden of a disappearing faith.
- Elek / Tesia – a pious smallholder with an inherited shame, looking for salvation.
- Feliks / Marta – an aspiring trader whose ambition, aspiration and inspiration has been robbed by the Blight.
- Gerik / Anka – a zealous guardian of the lore and artefacts of an almost extinguished culture.
- Wiktor / Wikta – a peasant farmer, ridden by the guilt that only he of his entire family was spared the curse of the Blight. Embittered and desperate, with nothing and nobody left to lose.
Content Advisory: 18+, sensitive themes
Genre: dark fantasy, swashbuckling, horror
Tags: quest, genocide, war, religion, plague, fertility, folklore
Media References: The Witcher
