Returning to The Borderlands

The Five Leagues game system is not set in a specific setting, as much as in an atmosphere or theme. That theme is what I’d call “low fantasy” with a gritty, horror-tinged feel. While I could go off and develop a whole world for it (something that I’ve done for so many other games in the past), I’ve opted to deliberately leave it ‘woolly’ and vague so I can concentrate on the immediate environs where the action will be taking place.

So, imagine a world that looks much like the one our ancestors inhabited – a world of feudal hierarchies, with priests and knights and commoners and merchants and all the other icons of medieval existence.

It’s a world where life can be short and grim. Warfare between feuding nobility, bandit raids, rampaging mercenaries and foreign raiders present several threats to life and limb. Now, those threats are, at the very least, understandable. They are something a man or woman can face in the daylight. However, when the evening fog creeps over the land, when clouds obscure the moon, when the shadows in the woods seem to move of their own accord, that’s when the peasants huddle together and the rich stay indoors.

Things lurk in the shadows. Monstrosities that should not live. Things from beyond our realms. Conspirators and heretics scheme, while beasts prowl.

If such things can lurk under the very noses of the mighty and the holy, what chance do normal folk stand? Can sword, torch and faith drive back the darkness, or will the shadows envelop all?

The campaign will focus on what we might term “recognizable” fantasy. A world where a band of heroes can exist but will contend with problems that seem realistic and plausible to us – bandit gangs, border raids and mad-eyed heretics.

As the campaign develops more, the night will get darker, and the shadows will get deeper.