The Hills of Bone and Whispers

 “Let ancient battles’ trauma scour calcified, accursed ground.”

• JAWBONE. Named for the giant bone in which the city’s Courthouse is carved, Jawbone lies in the mist-shrouded valley between two felled shoulderblades. Ex-Vornian and Karnish soldiers populate the crumbling apartments and tombstone-paved streets. The Red War’s sudden conclusion formally began about 5 decades ago when the Blue Concord was signed inside of the Jawbone Courthouse.

• THE RIBS. Warrens of vertical caverns are carved within each of these towering osseous spires. Each rib’s respective village is named for its lead output (Salt, Flesh, Artifice...), and all of the ribs surround an acres-large cemetery that serves as a monument to the Red War. The Mausoleum Rangers put down the undead that arise naturally from the cemetary’s muck and act as an inter-Rib mercenary police force.

• THE FORGES OF UNLIFE. The last known manufactury of Unliving silently hisses and churns out legions of hybrid machine-corpses. A demonic frog-creature known as the Foreman oversees the automated assembly line, and guards the portal to Inferno from which damned souls are plucked to power the infernal machines.

Principles:

• DEAD. Life is not natural here; it is the exception, fighting against an unrelenting wall of sorrow that seeks only to drown it. The landscape is mortared from the bones of antediluvian felled giants. A single white orchid grows amidst the field of rotting corpses. A hamlet of Unliving finds an infant floating down the river, but must learn how to care for the breathing babe fast, else it will die in their loving arms.

• WAR-TORN. The Red War’s recent conclusion has left its scars in the skeleton of the Hills forever more. A court-martialed general uses a rusting mechanical arm to bring his froth-capped mug to his lips. A screaming Vornian jingoist is brought to the gallows as he raves about the amorality of the Kanish scum. Weapons smugglers seek new employment by selling their cargo to parties across the pond in the Autumn Kingdoms.

• VICTORIAN. The Red War caused technology to accelerate to a widespread early steam level, and the culture at large changed to reflect it. A Dwarvish noblewoman stares out into the rain from within the first-class cabin of the renowned steam train Axon Express. A hunting party from the Moors chases a rotting beast into a twisted, mycelic wood marred by artillery craters. A forsaken Runeborn orphan has to make a choice whether to beg for copper shillings on the street or to work to the bone and beyond in a grotesque undead sweatshop.

--

DESIGN NOTES

To start out with, I needed a thesis as to what this region was. Something that stuck out to me was the singularity of “bone”: if it were “bones”, these hills might just be littered with skeletal debris, but the way it was written meant (at least to me) that the hills themselves were made of bone. This immediately gave me BONEPUNK vibes, which I wanted to continue to chase.

Another sort of idea I wanted to bring in was the idea of the Hills recovering from a recent war. It’s a theme that has vaguely been mentioned in some games I’ve run on the Arabus Ocean, so I wanted to maybe talk more about that conflict and bring it into the spotlight here, in this region. Perhaps the Hills lie across the Arabus from the Autumn Kingdoms?

So from those details, I sort of let ideas emerge from my intuitive soup. I wanted to avoid having a sort of ubermensch running the scene here to avoid cutting it too close to the Sylbarran Conclave- which is a shame, because an immediate impulse was to have some Dracula-alike ruling the place. I wanted to have the hills of bone be a result of the landscape being made from the skeletons of long-dead giants. All of this contributes to the poetic stanza at the top of the region, phrased so that it might fit into the Dirgesinger’s Canto.

Phase 2: the bullets. I like to structure the initial bullets like this.

• The biggest city in the region. Details about this urban hub go first. As a general rule, I like to use the bullets to put images in the DM’s/player’s minds, not to necessarily show my whole hand and explain everything. Describing a simple interaction between two residents may be just as powerful as namedropping the church and magic school and government building and marketplace.

• A smaller city or civilized area. Wherever the second largest cultural/civilization center is in the region, I detail it next. Oftentimes, I like to insert a subtle adventure hook in one of the first two, if not both, if I can help it. But to get everything I want to “fit”, I sometimes don’t have that luxury.

• An area in which to adventure. Some interesting little detail that the players can interact with or learn more about. There’s inherently a mystery, a clear potential for gameplay, or (if I’m lucky) both.

On the latter bullets, I lean more into the “putting images into the DM’s mind” side of things. Architectural periods, art history terms, evocative adjectives- I want to short-circuit a clear emotional picture into the DM’s brain of how to create content that fits in this region. That’s something I think settings should do more of: guide the DM as to creating in the spirit of the setting instead of laying out the literal, canonical truth of things.

Next, I plan to bang out a quick Character Matrix for the Hills of Bone and Whispers, then perhaps a short dungeon as well. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.