A traditional RPG campaign involves a small group of people meeting regularly in order to advance a tight, intricate plotline to its conclusion over the space of many months. This requires a significant time investment on the part of its players, and a single person's absence can set the entire campaign on hiatus depending on story context. This makes for fun and memorable moments, but also sets a high conceptual and temporal barrier to entry while making game groups more insular. The Black Horizon game is an experiment in changing some of these underlying expectations. Maybe it will fail, and that's okay.

This campaign is structured to accomplish the following goals:

• Play more often.
• Play with more people.

And so here's how this is going to work, maybe:

1. Anyone can play in any session. Every session involves a self-contained adventure or simply a flat stated goal, such as “clear out the bad place” or “chart the unknown territory over there.” Each of these goals help move the world forward, but any player can easily drop in or out at any time without the risk of missing anything terribly important.
   1. This means you can feel free to bring a friend to try out a session and see if they like it without them having to commit to an entire huge-ass story arc.
   2. If groups get too big maybe we'll set up some kind of sign-up list or something, I dunno. We'll cross that bridge if/when we come to it.
2. All sessions begin and end in the same place in the game world. Keeping everything modular enough for the necessary flexibility means that we can't have various random unfinished adventures hanging in the wilderness. The expectation is that you go out, do a thing, and come back to home base before the session ends.
   1. If everybody in a given group is invested in continuing a given adventure instead of cutting it short at the end of a session, then maybe we can work something out.
   2. Otherwise, we'll probably just hand-wave the return trip if necessary, and roll dice to see if you made it back okay or not.
3. You can have multiple characters. The game isn't about any individual hero, which actually gives you a lot of freedom. Play an alt! Try new things!
   1. Characters can be retired after they've gone through at least one session. This gives bonus XP to any future characters you create and lets them become trainers, passing on some of their knowledge to any future characters that want it (including your own).
   2. Characters can also die. Death is on a pretty high shelf, but it can happen. If it does, your dead character is memorialized and future generations can study their life for a small amount of XP.
   3. If you master an ability tree with one character, all your others get a discount when purchasing abilities from that tree forever! Consider it an “account” unlock.

The empire of Torquetum is the empire of humanity, for humanity exists nowhere else save the towns and villages on the great plains of the islands surrounding the mountain that is its namesake.

This is not to say that humanity is an entirely united race by any means, or that Empress Gloriosa of the third dynasty holds nearly the unlimited power that is ascribed to her.

Two things have kept Torquetum more-or-less united so far: the external dangers of the savage world and the Church. Demihumans might have built their own civilizations in the ruins of the Legacies, and some of them might rival Torquetum in size and advancement (though this point is only admitted grudgingly), but none of them have the advantage of divine mandate or manifest destiny.

It's no secret that the Legacy ruins that dot the world are almost all human-sized. Walk into any given ancient shell and you'll find monsters and magic aplenty, but also furniture, controls and mystical artifacts all clearly meant for human use. It is self-evident that when the Goddess created the world, she made it with her later and greatest creation of humanity in mind. If she hadn't been forced to sleep, humanity would already possess all the gifts she made specially for them.

No matter. While Torquetum waits for her return, they steadily spread and retake the Legacies on their own as their birthright. Humanity is a clever and adaptable species fully capable of overcoming hardship, after all.

The Empress rules all of Torquetum from the First City, and her duchesses hold their lands in fief from her, and they in turn divide their holdings between loyal baronesses, and so on. This is the natural order of things. It's no secret, however, that the Empress' power has decidedly waned in recent times as her vassals wage war both open and secret upon each other for power and influence. She is old and feeble and her children are all conniving simpletons unfit for rule, but still strong enough that nobody admits this anywhere but the outer provinces.

Having expanded to fill all corners of the Isles of the Divine and under mounting population pressure, many say that the time is now ripe for humanity to become the ruler of multiple lands. Since the invention of celestial navigation, sailors and scouts have become able to cross the deep oceans, and some have returned from the far east with stories of an unimaginably vast landmass there ripe for the taking.

By the Empress' decree, in the year 917 a fleet of ships has been chartered bound for the land across the sea. Adventure-seekers with few prospects and all walks of life have volunteered for the trip- eighth children of the nobility, land-hungry businessmen, war orphans, shantytown dwellers tired of fighting off hordes of iguanas for their meals every day. The movement is full of opportunity, although not all see the same opportunities in it.

No matter who goes to the new colony on the Black Horizon or what ultimately ends up happening there, it is absolutely certain that its fate will be largely shaped by the Goddess' Ravens. Named after the mythological bird, the Ravens have always stood as the silent, faceless and forgotten watchdogs of history.

The scriptures are very clear, after all. One human enacting violence on another is wicked. Lying is a sin. Taking money, life or freedom away from others breaks the heart of the Goddess. And yet, a state must often do these exact things to its own citizens. In the early years, Ravens were all state-owned indentured servants (“slave” is considered a distasteful word) set to break divine decree just enough to keep people safe and orderly. They are the living embodiment of humanity's inability to fully embrace the teachings of the Goddess, an inglorious stopgap solution to a problem that wouldn't exist without evil.

In the centuries since, Ravens have served many purposes- police, spies, inquisitors, press-gang operators, tax collectors, scouts, sappers, special forces and suicide mission fodder. Citizens can volunteer to become Ravens now, although the low pay and social stigma will always keep out all but the most determined, foolhardy or desperate.

Torquetum is a nation in the early stages of decline- teetering on the brink of becoming a failed state, to use a more contemporary term. It will likely fall into fractured warring states within a generation or two, and it's unlikely that the players will have any effect on this. The central questions and stakes of the campaign revolve not around preserving the old, but developing the new. More specifically, developing the colony on the Black Horizon into a new civilization and society.

The Church of Torquetum is basically what would happen if a pagan earth-mother cult gained the same depth of ritual, social capital, political strength and lack of accountability as middle-ages Catholicism. Its message is pure, but the gap between ideal and reality continues to grow as corruption seeps through the ranks. The actual existence of the Goddess is more a matter of faith than hard evidence, but Her clergy can work “miracles” in Her name.

All players play Ravens, set to do the work that society finds unholy, distasteful or merely unpleasant. You could be charting new territory, solving crimes, conducting diplomacy, committing assassinations, rooting out wickedness, or any number of other possibilities. Life on the frontier affords you a lot of freedom to set your own agenda and work to shape history on your own terms.

If Torquetai culture is maintained then history is unlikely to remember your name, but the Rookery where your order is headquartered will always welcome you home again. If the colony develops into something new, then perhaps the societal role of Ravens will develop as well.

Because of the nature of an open game, the colony will not be under the direct control of any given player. Instead, there are three NPC leaders who are in charge. Each leader will offer different missions to the players, and completing a mission for a leader furthers that leader's agenda (or in other words, adds progress to whatever project that leader is currently building).

The unique circumstances at play mean that I'm going to set a rare metagame-level boundary/guarantee here: all three leaders are essentially good people. None of them secretly abuse puppies or accept bribes or plot genocides or anything like that. Any secrets they may or may not have that get revealed in play will not be the kind of secrets that invalidate your previous support for them (if any). This is because they are not just NPCs, but also representatives of separate philosophies of government. No such guarantee exists for literally any other NPC, of course.

• Mission Style: Fighter (confront the problem head-on).
• Governing Priority: Security

The daughter of a provincial baroness with many enemies, Sarah survived her first assassination attempt at the age of twelve by putting a bullet from her father's gun into the chest of her would-be killer. She hesitated when pulling the trigger, and thus her twin brother is no longer alive. She will never hesitate again.

Sarah attained the rank of Duchess through a combination of managerial skills and unorthodox tactics that won her the support of the common folk, but made her fellow nobles distinctly uneasy. It's no surprise that she was selected by the Empress for a posting far away from the imperial court… and the imperial seat.

• Mission Style: Mage (carefully study the problem).
• Governing Priority: Authority

Alan Stoneveil is problematic to the Church. He has several ideas that are troublesome to the existing social order (such as the abolition of forced indentured servitude or the use of tithing funds to build more orphanages instead of grander temples) and several others that border on outright heresy (such as the notions that demihumans may have souls or that certain clerical arts should be available for women to learn).

Only two things have kept him from being stripped of his title and expelled from the order: the first being that he clearly carries the Goddess' favor, as he has mastered many of her more difficult miracles. The second and more relevant reason is that he is one of the Empress' nephews. Both of these reasons were used as excuses to ship him across the ocean and “solve” the Church's problem.

• Mission Style: Rogue (go around the problem).
• Governing Priority: Prosperity

Bernard came to power not through noble birth or privilege, but through hard work and unflagging enthusiasm. Born to a peasant family and gifted with a head for numbers and a rare knack for the Web, he built his first business around repairing Legacy artifacts and putting them to use in his local community. His experiences of life in poverty have made him both highly sympathetic to the common folk and a shrewd negotiator, despite the fact that his mumbled speech style makes him difficult to understand.

Nobody ordered Bernard to cross the sea. He came on his own in search of new opportunities in a new land, and he is determined to find them.

Also, the commonly held story above is a complete fabrication. Magister Osborn is actually a psychic grizzly bear masquerading as a human. Yes, really.