Introduction
Endless and undying servitude awaits those foolish enough to displease the undead Red King of Ashenrend. Monstrous minions, listless muted undead and ghosts of fallen heroes prowl a nation state that encompases all of the known world. Outlying realms have been conquered or destroyed and the only threats to the Red King’s rule for the last thousand years have come not from without, but within. The Red King’s most powerful servants, elder liches, undead dragons and cruel monstrous creatures rule over huge tracts of the realm in his name. Many of them plot and scheme to one day take his place but none have ever succeeded. Those that fail in the great game lie imprisoned within the Red Citadel within the great Ashen City. The few living races live in constant fear of death and a fate far worse than death, to not only die but to be risen and enslaved for all eternity.
Running the Setting
This is a not an adventure or a campaign, instead this is a setting guide you will be able to use in order to create your own games. Eternal Tyranny is a heroic fantasy game disguised as dark fantasy made for the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. You will need to reference the Player's Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeons Master's Guide for abilities, spell statistics and magical items. In addition, this book is meant for the Dungeon Master alone and although reading the whole book will give you a more thorough understanding of the setting you do not need to read everything in order to start playing.
Character Creation
In a game of Eternal Tyranny, the players are somewhat curtailed in their choices and can only choose undead characters to play as. This gives the players a more limited option for races, with a different outlook on life (and death) but they can still be just a varied and interesting as elves, dwarves or dragonborn. The races listed in the appendix are the most common options for a player to choose from and made specifically to fit in this setting. If the players wish to play something else that they have found or created themselves then they can consult with the Dungeon Master before the start of the game. Classes however can be chosen as normal and examples of what those kind of choices might mean for character is also covered in the appendix.
Mandatory Trait
All player characters gain access to this trait: When you die, you return to life 1d4 hours later. Even if your body is wholly destroyed, you reform from a dust at a location close to where you died. All your hit points are restored, but diseases, poisons, and curses you were previously affected by still persist as normal.
Undead & Monsters
The Ashen realm is filled with different kinds of undead that make up entire cities, towns and villages. Monstrous creatures are also widely represented but are often rarer and less likely to make up large populations. When picking a race, class, background combination to play in Eternal Tyranny you should consider playing something untraditional. Ghosts, skeletons, zombies, wights etc are all perfectly suitable for an adventure in Eternal Tyranny. Monsters like trolls, harpies, hags and golems are also a good choice.
Alignment. When choosing an alignment for a character, you do not have to pick something evil, this is not an evil campaign, but evil acts are very common. Mortality and ethics in the Ashen Realm are very different to the real world and a normal D&D adventure. Obedience to more powerful undead, the overloads and the Red King himself is absolute and failure to complete tasks or questioning authority is often a reason for living individuals to be killed and turned into undead or if already undead, years of relentless torture.
Lawful Realm. The realm of Ashenrend is built upon a very strict set of laws, things like theft, blackmail or even murder without cause are a high crimes punishable by one hundred years of torture and becoming a brainless muted creature is common.
Character Advancement
The traditional way of advancing characters based on experience points typical in many role playing games does not make much sense for this setting. Characters are undead and may have been undead for many hundreds of years, advancing quickly in skill after fighting and defeating monsters is simply not believable. You can of course still use experience points if you wish or instead use a milestone system where you award a level after a session or completion of a major quest.
However Eternal Tyranny offers a different way to level characters.
Fragments & Fractures
Player characters in the Eternal Tyranny setting are broken and tormented individuals. They have been undead for many lifetimes and have forgotten what it was like to be alive. This places a heavily toil on their mental fortitude and characters experience fractures of their souls and minds every time they experience death or mind altering horrors that bend their reality.
Fractures
At the beginning of the game, players roll a single d4 + 6. This is the maximum total of Fractures a character has for the rest of the game and can't gain anymore. However during the course of the game they can lose them. Every time a character dies they lose a fracture. The consequences of this can be seen in the table below.
| Fractures | Consequence |
|---|---|
| 5 | Vulnerability to psychic damage. |
| 4 | You forget things once important to you. Choose two skills you are proficient in. You are no longer proficient in them. |
| 3 | The fracturing has severely distorted your perception of reality. You are no longer sure of what is real and fake. You have disadvantage on all Perception rolls. |
| 2 | You have been severely touched by madness, roll a d6 and a d4. The d6 determines which stat is affected and the d4 determines how many points of that stat you lose. |
| 1 | Muted. The player character becomes muted, a brainless undead that no longer has free will and you are now partly controlled by the Dungeon Master. |
In order to regain fractures and mend the tearing of your character soul and mind the player characters can spend fragments to regain fractures back up to their original maximum and negate any negative consequences.
Fragments
Fragments are the of equivalent of experience points, offering the party the chance to meaningfully decide when to increase their power. This may at first seem like a strange way of playing, as you would think the party would always choose to increase their power at the first opportunity. However this system is also paired with Fractures so that the party as whole must make a choice on what to spend their fragments on and when.
Almost every creature drops a fragment after death, much like experience points, however the total you need to advance in level is much less. This is because you can work out how many fragments a creature drops by using its CR. If a creature has less than 1 CR, roll a d20 on a 10+ they drop a single fragment anything else results in zero fragments.
The party can decide when to use the fragments they have obtained from killing monsters and can store them for use at a later point. Fragments can be used to level up, or restore fractures. You can see how many the party needs for each in the table provided. Choosing to level up, save or spend fragments is completely up to the party as a whole and every decision made by the party must be agreed upon by everyone at the table. In addition fractures restored only applies to a single character, while leveling up applies to everyone at the table so everyone advances at the same time.
Fractures & Fragments Table
| Level | Fractures | Fragments |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 10 |
| 2 | 5 | 50 |
| 3 | 12 | 100 |
| 4 | ||
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| 20 |
Deathless
Eternal Tyranny is a brutal world, death for the undead is inevitable and player characters will “die” often during the course of the game. You may wish to create fiendishly hard dungeons or make them confront challenging monsters at every turn. Or you may want to create story driven elements that force the characters into difficult situations and sacrificing themselves for the completion of a goal might be a worthy option. You can of course mix the two and the goal is make the characters feel like every death has a consequence even though it might not seem like it at first glance. A TPK or total party kill can still theoretically occur during the game. If all the player characters become muted then the adventure is over.
Setting Overview
As the dry winds howl and the land becomes more barren and choked with dust there is little hope left for the living and the undead are everywhere. But this broken and dying land stands on a knife edge with the rule of the Red King finally been questioned. Less than six months ago the western mountains imploded in an unnatural super eruption of titanic proportions, the earthquakes, raining ash and intense wildfires left a crumbling realm of death and despair completely devastated.
During this time of chaos, the Red King has disappeared and his great undead armies are leaderless or completely incapacitated. But the eruption was only the beginning and not long after the land was torn apart, a ravenous demonic horde burst forth from the shattered mountains and began devouring everything in their path, both the living and the dead.
Shardknights
Cities of the undead, savage monsters and the few living races are falling one by one, even the most powerful creatures of the Ashen realm can do little to stop the spread of the demons.
In desperation, only reforming the once legendary shardblade knights can the realm hope to stand against the onslaught. The shardblades and armours of the knightly order were destroyed or hidden away by the Red King nearly a thousand years ago so that none might challenge his absolute dominion. But they are now the only thing that can combat the demon host before they swallow the world.
The party must find a way to stop the demons and make a choice, put an end to centuries of darkness or continue the tyranny with a new king of the ash sitting on the throne.
Setting Structure
As mentioned in the first part of the introduction, this book is not a fully fleshed out adventure or campaign, instead it is a setting guide, one that give you the tools to create a world and story for yourself. Locations are mentioned and given descriptions , characters are fleshed out in detail and a broad theme is given in order for you to play something with a semblance of a plot, but in reality you have a great deal of freedom to do whatever you want and run something that fits your own play style. This book is supposed to not only give you as the DM a great deal of freedom but also to give the players a chance to impact the world as they see fit and make the kind of changes they want. This might be extremely drastic and every possible outcome they might wish to pursue cannot be covered in this book and that's okay. Even if this happens and players start to do things that are not covered here, this book is here to give you a baseline and solid foundation to work from.
Chapter 1: Dust & Ashes, Outlines the major characters, the small village of Wormick, plot hooks and the major themes you might need in order to start up a game.
Chapter 2: Ashenrend, Outlines the world and continent of Ashenrend, The locations and notable characters that you can encounter during a game.
Chapter 3: End Game, Outlines how you might end a game of Eternal Tyranny and contains spoilers regarding the major characters and events.
The Appendix, has contains guidelines and information on choosing characters, special items and monster stat blocks.
Unlikely Heroes
Another briefly mentioned aspect of Eternal Tyranny is its theme, which is Heroic Fantasy disguised as Dark Fantasy. In Heroic Fantasy the heroes are thrust into positions of great responsibility, they must rise to meet great challenges and often become heroes simply by participating in events that unfold around them. Dark Fantasy combines fantasy with elements of horror and has a gloomy, dark atmosphere, with a sense of horror and dread. Both of these are fully represented in Eternal Tyranny but the player characters will no doubt find themselves becoming heroes over time, even as they interact and participate in world of undead creatures and horrible events. Whether they see themselves as heroes in the end is up to them but this in turn means that the setting has a hidden hopeful tone and feeling.
Lifeless World
Countless ancient corpses, lying in piles or cast adrift against dead trees of fossilised wood can be found along the roads and pathways. Dry winds of dust and ash moan against tattered decaying buildings. Nothing green grows under the dark sun. The dead can be found everywhere, every village town and city is comprised of the corpses, bones and ghosts of the fallen races that once inhabited the realm.
The grim nature of the setting can be expanded upon and shown to the players in a number of ways, The following tips are for you to take into consideration in addition to some of the descriptions and details already given for areas and characters.
- Take your time in describing the rotting and crumbling buildings, the faded clothing and thick layers of dust and ash. Everything seems to be decaying and once strong and noble things are mere echoes of their former glory.
- The light coming from above is dim and dark, full daylight is not much better than twilight and thick mists and fogs are common along the coast, giving the world an oppressive closed in feeling.
- Most NPC’s are muted, having fractured completely over the thousand years the Red King has ruled over Ashenrend. They cannot talk and the older they are, the less likely that can move or do anything at all.
- Other Undead NPC’s can be found with a wide range of personalities but many are grim brooding and depressive with fatalistic outlooks on the future, most are fearful of becoming muted.
- Player characters themselves are undead and make sure remind them every now and then by having them look into a pool of water, mirror or NPC reaction and see their undead visage reflected back at them.
Chaper 1: Dust & Ashes
Areas of Wormwick
The following areas correspond to labels on the map above. Some of the houses do not have any further details and represent buildings used by ordinary NPC's that live in the Hamlet.
1. Muted Pens
2. Gummery
3. The Cages
4. Garrison
5. Weavers
6. Sericulturist
7. Watchtower
8. Collecter
Chapter 2: Ashenrend
Ashenrend
The center of the Eternal Tyranny setting
Wormwick
The starting location of the party and small village of silk production
Knights Fall
Ancient battlefield filled with crumbling weapons and armour
Lush Oasis
A strange vibrant oasis of lush trees and plants
Howling Deep
Deep caverns that reach down into the underworld
The Spirit Vault
Destroyed fortress that has collapsed into the earth
Leviathon Corpse
Massive deep seas monster that has washed ashore and lies rotting on the sands
Cockatrice Lair
The rough location of a vicious Cockatrice
Ebonspire
The City of Ebonspire, a single spire looms over the eight districts. Overlord: Black Dragon
Palemire
Crocodile farming village
Ash
Captial City, Home of the Red King and the Crimson Guard
The Weeping Towers
The Remains of an Elven City
Haunted Roost
Small village overhanging the cliffs, home to many Undead Giant Bats
Nightmare Lamia Lair
Not your typical Lamia
City of Scales
Crumbling city of savage desert lizardfolk
Whitecross
Large town built around the crypts of fallen kings.
Frostlake
A decadent palace built on an island in the middle of a lake. Overlord: Lich
Shademine
Mountain Village that mines crystals
Crystal Dragon Lair
Likes to raid Shademine for food
Deadport
Town of raiders and undead pirates, Overlord: Bone Collective
Blood Jungles
Deep festering jungles, full of massive experimental monsters
Infernal Lightouse
Cursed and ignored
The Black Mist
Oh no, the spooky
Steamguard
Ancient fortress
Wardstone
Shard of oily black rock that has recently fallen from the heavens
Rustcross
Small town to the east of Ash
Silver Sanctum
Crumbling temple on a small island off the coast
Thunder Keep
Destroyed City, now inhabited by demons
Westrun
Destroyed Village, now inhabited by demons
Bonedale
Destroyed Town, now inhabited be demons
The Rift
Demon Gateway into Ashenrend
Chapter 3: End Game
Appendix
Death is Eternal
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