Weeks Late and Several Dollars Short

So thanks to sickness and more, this post is not one but three weeks late. I apologize to anyone that actually cared enough to read these things.

Getting back to my adventures in Vathak, I wanted to talk a little bit about scale and pacing. Vathak doesn't look it at first glance, but it's frickin' huge. The continent is intended to be roughly the same size as North America, making the vast empire that Grigoria has managed to acquire a seriously impressive accomplishment.

Now, part of this is due to the fact the map of Vathak lacks a scale. I believe (I am not in charge of anything, so this is just my personal understanding of the decision) the map was left without a scale to better accommodate dropping Vathak into GMs' games. Vathak can be as big or as small as you need it to be, since only the major cities are on it.

In trying to stay as canon as possible, I've kept Vathak big. Really big. And the scale of just getting across Grigoria was staggering to my players. It would take two to three weeks to move from the foothills of the Gray Peaks to the capital of Grigoria. They would need to deal with the trackless hills and windy highlands between the two mountain ranges, all while keeping supplied with food and water and making sure the cart they'd loaded full with ill-gotten-goods (as any good adventurer's goods should be) survived the journey.

This could have been a quick pan-and-skip to the city, but I wanted to highlight some of the more mundane aspects of Vathak. They'd just come off the bloody halls of the Sanguine Laboratory, revived their friend from the dead, and made a new necromancer ally... so showing off some parts of Vathak that didn't involve murder cults or vampire lords seemed a nice change.

Enter the town of Verdenalder, a simple hamlet of no more than one hundred souls. They knew little of the war with the Old Ones, knowing only that some of the young men had journeyed off to Eisin'dorf to join the army. They had little to provide the players, offering only a place to keep warm in the village's Common Hall. Their most powerful residents paled in comparison to the players, but they showed not a glimmer of the same world-weary troubles as the adventurers. In Verdenalder, the sun shone high over great fields of grains and the troubles of Vathak were distant.

A lovely sampling of Vathak's more homely folk, thanks to Rick's Patreon.

Within the week the PCs would find themselves struggling to navigate their cart over a half-flooded bridge in the midst of a storm. But, for a brief moment, they got to experience a calm and peaceful Vathak. One that was not mired in the gray morality of the Church's actions, nor the grim reality of an endless, unwinnable war. They could see priests sans political motivations, and cambions living (mostly) free of the discrimination they might face elsewhere, getting along just like everyone else.

And sometimes, especially in Vathak, that is just fine.