Brief Synopses on Worlds and Contracts

[Saberfan]

The PCs are all members of the Realmwardens and accepting contracts from them will form the backbone of the adventuring part of the campaign. Some contracts are from private entities from across the Multiverse, while others are from higher-ups within the Realmwardens (these are much more lucrative, but also more dangerous). The party will be able to pick and choose from the list of contracts while at the guildhall and thereby customize not just what plotlines they get to experience, but also what worlds they will visit and foes they will face. Listed below will be a very short synopsis of a few sample contracts that are, or will become, available. This is not a comprehensive list and this serves as only about a sixth of the total contracts that will be available by the campaign's end, with some earlier contracts thrown in there with later ones just to give a good idea of the variety of both worlds and adventure ideas.

• There exists a fantastical world of colossal godbeasts and roaming tribes that hunt them across harshly beautiful landscapes for food and materials. But lately the hunts have met with disaster as a particularly ancient and malicious godbeast has begun a hunt of its own. As the number of able-bodied hunters dwindle, one tribe's shaman uses a long-forgotten magic to walk the Planes Beyond the World-Mountain in search of someone who can track down and slay the godbeast, promising to bestow great wealth and armaments forged of the great beast's divine bones to any who would aid her people.
• In a far prime material plane inhabited by beast-blooded yokai people like the kitsune and tengu, the Eternal Empress has been murdered and all of the clans are suspect as the empire stands on the brink of civil war. A small coalition of cooler heads among the samurai and onmyou have banded together and requested the aid of the Realmwardens, who have no true ties to any party, nor stake in the line of succession, to investigate who murdered the Empress and why. But the guilty party is not going to take this lying down and will use every underhanded tactic in their disposal to ensure that the truth never comes to light.
• An isolated tropical island of humanoids infused with the blood of the now-extinct dragons of their world have recently made forays into the worlds beyond and are holding an interplanar martial (and magical) arts tournament within the ancient temple-city of Palas-Eja, inviting anyone to participate. A higher-up within the Realmwardens wishes for the organization to participate in order to foster friendly relations with the natives and has issued a contract requesting a group to attend, although even they cannot predict what events will come next as the remnants of a long-lost civilization, older than even the dragons and inventors of the crystalline magics now used on the island, begin to awaken once more.
• A world of perpetual twilight beauty inhabited by the fey has fallen under a dark curse. The ancient Tree of Beginnings from which the first fey were born withers and, with it, their race's immortality. Fear and desperation have driven many to turn to necromancy, diabolism, or worse in an attempt to stave off the slow death brought on by the curse. The Realmwardens have been contracted by a kindhearted fairy to discover the origins of the curse and, if possible, lift it before her people are lost in both body and spirit.
• The Penal Colony Ship: Orpheus, containing both criminals and innocents labeled as undesirables by the reigning galactic dictatorship of an alternate Earth, was jettisoned into the far reaches of space where it was planned that its inhabitants would found a research colony. But the city-sized ship passed through a spatial distortion and now drifts through a hellish dimension in dark space. Fiends who have never held a humanoid form now roam the ship, the guardian robots have started to go mad and massacre those within their proximity, and roving bands of gangs freed from their cells have taken over entire sectors of the increasingly demolished ship. A higher-up within the Realmwardens has issued a contract to rescue the innocents trapped onboard, one of which is a latent Gatewalker that the guild has had its eyes on.
• A beggar from the Nexus has put in a contract with the Realmwardens asking them to help his sister, who fell asleep more than a week ago and has not woken since. A higher-up within the guild took pity on the boy and has agreed to cover the cost of hiring guild agents himself. After performing a battery of magical tests, it has been determined that the girl's soul is trapped within a dark and dangerous corner of the Plane of Dreams known as the Dying Sea of Nevermore where uncarnate beings of nightmares and madness dwell. Any who would take on this contract must journey bodily into an ever-shifting dreamworld to save the girl's soul from whatever being has ensnared it while avoiding the unseen dangers of the land and ravenous nightmares.
• A newer recruit to the Realmwardens, an android infused with a soul crafted through the use of egregore-generating occult cybermancy, was once the slave of her master in an occultpunk (my term for cyberpunk with large occult magical motifs) megacity, but fled after rescuing an orphan that she has since raised as her own. She has recently learned of disturbing developments in her homeworld- artificial angels crafted in alchemical factories and compelled to enforce tyranny against their will through magical halo-collars, cybernetic demons who fight against the powers that be for reasons their own, and a population caught in the crossfire between the two. Her contract asks that any available party travel to her world and meet with an old mage-hacker friend of hers that goes by the name W4LPuR6I5N4CHT (Walpurgisnacht), who has been looking for a way to free the people of their world from both the occultech tyrants who rule from gilded skycrapers and the equally-terrible cyberdemon rebels who use regular citizens as both disposable weapons and playthings.
• A freelance planar adventurer from the elemental planes has recently acquired the location of a demiplane folded into the vast reaches of the Astral Expanse, said to contain the treasures of a lost-dead civilization from the early days of the Multiverse. While headstrong and eager to leap at the prospect of uncovering such a prize, he is no fool and has placed a contract with the Realmwardens in an attempt to gain partners in this latest venture. Those who accept will journey with him into a crumbling demiplane and delve into ruins lost to time in search of wealth, glory, and the promise of lost knowledge from the vanished creators of the Nexus itself.

Again, this is but a sampling of the contracts that will be available at the start of the game or will become available later on. As you can see probably tell, there is a lot of variety in terms of what worlds and storylines the party can explore just from what I listed here: rescue missions, monster hunting forays, martial arts tournaments with a twist, murder mysteries, traditional heroic takedowns of tyrants, dungeon delves, and lifting a world-withering curse, just to name a few.

Edited December 29, 2023 by Saberfan (see edit history)