The Valet

Clever and accomplished servants are a staple of literature dating back to ancient literature. From the wily Tranio, to the stolid and dependable Alfred Pennyworth, to Stevens of Darlington Hall, to the ever accomplished Childermass, to the paragon of valets Stephen Black, to the eminently respectable Mr Littimer, to that King of all servants the inimitable Jeeves.

The Valet

You are that most respected of all servants, a Valet. A Gentleman's personal Gentleman. Perhaps you are in service to another member of the party, on a wide ranging adventure to fulfill a circuitous plan for your distant master, or in between positions at this moment. In whatever case, you are on the road, and always at hand to assist your new companions.

You are a master of etiquette, fashion, and all relevant social graces. You are also always incredibly well prepared be it with a freshly laundered suit, restorative hangover cure, or set of lockpicks (in case sir found himself locked out of his apartments at a potentially embarrassing juncture). Your advice is always timely, discrete, and exactly as needed for the situation. You bring dignity and class to any situation, and ensure those meeting your troupe that they can only be of the highest rank of gentility.

 

Always Prepared

"Fifty foot of rope, sir? I had a presentiment that sir might require such a thing on sir's jaunt today and took the liberty of preparing for such an eventuality"

No matter the situation you always seem to have the right tool of the job. It's not magic, you simply have a knack for anticipating the needs and requirements of a gentleman.

For a number of times equal to your level per day you may produce, as if from nowhere, any given mundane item. After being produced the item will count towards encumbrance, but not before. It can be of fine quality but only of trivial monetary value.

Although no item can be a weapon, (a gentleman carries his own sword/brace of pistols/dueling mace) there is no restriction from using any item as an improvised weapon in combat; i.e. you cannot pull out a sword, but you can hit someone with a fine bottle of brandy. 

 

Height of Fashion

"If sir would care to wait a mere trice, I shall have sir's trousers pressed presently"

A well pressed suit is the mark of any true Gentleman. Given an hour's preparation time, and only the contents of your valise, you may prepare another character perfectly for reception in fine society. A quick run of the lint brush, a splash of lavender water, and a discrete mopping up of bloodstains, and anyone can be made presentable to scions of even the most ancient royal house.

In game terms you are able to give another character a bonus to reaction rolls equal to your level when presenting themselves as a member of the gentry. You may provide this bonus to multiple characters, but you must devote at least one hour's prep time to each to gain the benefit.

(It goes without saying that as a matter of professional pride you are always impeccably presented)

When properly pressed, even being dressed as a giant bat is acceptable as black tie

Butler

"If sir would care to retire to the study for brandy and cigars, I shall return shortly after I have reprimanded the help"

The butler is the King of all servants. You are assumed to be able to carry out any household task to an exceptional standard, although it may in fact be beneath your dignity as a distinguished gentleman's gentleman. You stand resplendent at the top of the hierarchy of servants.

You always gain a +2 reaction roll bonus when dealing with other servants, other butlers and housekeepers will recognize you as their equal and an initiate of the familial order of butlers. Any servant of a lower order will automatically defer to you in all things (not necessarily liking you, but certainly intimidated by your noble bearing).

 

Batman 

"Excellent shot sir"

A well trained valet is prepared to serve as batman if a gentleman is called to serve as an officer. An officer's batman is expected to convey orders from the officer to subordinates, maintain the officer's uniform and personal equipment, act as the officer's bodyguard in combat, dig the officer's foxhole in combat, and other miscellaneous tasks the officer does not have time or inclination to do.

 

In peace or war it is always helpful to have someone carrying your rifle

A valet is expected also to present his officer with a freshly primed firing piece when required, offer timely advice in the unlikely event that his officer has neglected to take note of a particular battlefield condition, and in general make combat a less troublesome business.

Mechanically, as a valet you can by sacrificing your own action grant an adjacent character a to hit bonus equal to your level. In addition to this, you may reload another character's firearm/crossbow/other weapon which requires a reload action, as a free action in order.

A gentleman is only as good as his staff

Rules Malarky
Hit Dice: d8 per level
Experience Track: As Fighter
Saves: As Fighter

Special Abilities:
Always Prepared: A number of times per day equal to your level you can retroactively reveal to have been carrying any mundane item the whole time.
Height of Fashion: Given at least an hour to prepare you can ensure another character is dressed appropriately and cleanly enough to be well received as a well-bred member of fine society. Any character prepared by you will gain a reaction bonus equal to your level.
Butler: As the highest order of servants, you are held in high regard. In addition to being assumed to carry out any menial servant task to an exceptional standard, you always gain a +2 reaction roll bonus when dealing with other servants. Any servant (other than another butler) will automatically defer to you in all things
Unflappable: You are immune to fear effects.
Batman: By sacrificing your own turn, you grant another character a bonus to hit equal to your level. You can also reload a weapon that requires a reload action as a free action.

 

Not Holy, Not Roman, Not an Empire

Look at that dapper fellow, as if he would ever say anything misleading between all the lottery rigging he was doing

So, since playing in a Fantasy Medieval game is essentially a mish-mash of all the things that seem sort of cool about the Medieval period, I figured that I would set the beginning of my game in a pastiche of what was a mish-mash of a load of different things: The Holy Roman Empire. It is a great model to jam all the cool stuff that happens in Medieval Fantasy together: you want mercantile city states? They're there! You want proto-republics? You got it! You want Bishop Princes ruling ignorant serfs? Right over the next hill! You want a grand high king but don't want to worry about how complex that sort of rule would actually be? All-hail the Emperor! Politics, and trade, and warring states, and religious tensions all come together in the wonderful stew that was the Holy Roman Empire. There's a reason Games Workshop used it.

One reason this sort of model is so neat, is that you can have a war, without it dominating your whole story. You want your players to be able to wander around in a relatively politically homogeneous area, whilst having new types of culture just over the next hill. It works equally well to make a "points of light" trek through the frontiers of Empire, where Barons are only notionally under the auspices of a distant authority figure, and the wild forests remain untamed.

Using this you can flip back and forth between "Empire united against a common foe/great war against darkness" thing and "barons at each others throats" as the situation demands. There's always the possibility of setting a civil war not too far in the past, allowing for the "Wild West" style expansion at the fringes. Formerly glorious nobles exiled to the edges of the known world, far from the vengeance of court.

 The other thing that it saves on is having a common language. You can have all sorts of local languages and dialects, but it can be assumed that there is some form of Imperial lingua franca which covers the whole territory. It gives an in-universe reason for "common" to exist without it seeming too contrived. After all, there needs to be a way for all Imperial decrees and tax-codes to be distributed.

Tomb Ship of the Lich King

So, I had wanted a place to plug in any particular dungeon or maze that I thought was cool and wanted to shove my players into, or maybe make some sort of great big mega-dungeon, but without having to fit it inconveniently into the world if it didn't exactly mesh. I saw this as a kind of living mega dungeon, full of surprises and treasure that was always inexplicably shifting, so that players could explore it, and it would be different next time.

The Pyramid

Some time in the great long winter that swallowed the planet in its journey to the Orrery, it was hit by a number of large impacts, many were the meteorites and other detritus that brought the Fey to the Orrery. The greatest of the impacts however, was a massive space-faring vessel. Miles long it was, of immense power and age. A craft in form and wonder to rival even the greatest science-magics of the long-vanished Naga Empire. An ancient thing, long traveled in the dark wastes of space and carrying within it an Ancient Evil. It was: The Tomb Ship of the Lich King.

A pretty accurate depiction of my blatant plagiarism

The impact with the planet was enough to sunder continents, to rearrange the world, and to scatter shards and fragments of the great vessel across the surface of the planet. It would have been enough to cause an extinction level event, had the extinction of the planet not already come and gone with its displacement within space.

The grandest piece however, was the central point. Although only a small fragment of the whole, the command centre jettisoned from the body of the ship, the pyramid still dwarfs all nearby structures both artificial and natural. A great pyramid, eight miles long each side, and plated in a deep obsidian black which seems to drink all light around it. 


The Lich King

Whatever it once was, by the time it journeyed onto the Ethereal Seas, it was a being of magic and horror. A desiccated corpse bound together with arcane forces, moved by a malevolent and inscrutable will. The Tomb Ship was its greatest achievement, wrought of forbidden and arcane geometry, fueled by black rituals and blood magic, formed in to a super-massive Pyramid fifteen miles a side.

The Lich King is known only as a shadowy figure. Many legends are told of his frightening presence. The Fey know of the Lich, and some say that it was once one of them. Although it is not certain whether the Lich has ever walked forth from the Tomb Ship, or if it only sends forth its malevolent influence in  the form of shadows and sorcery.

The Tomb Kings of the Great Valley, that mighty civilization that rose in the shadow of the black pyramid, erected mighty mountains of stone in imitation of the great structure which dominated their land and thoughts.

The Passengers

Aside from the Lich itself, there were also the servants, bred to do its bidding, to run the various systems of the monstrous machine as well as serve as the occasional experimental subject.

Bred and warped from what appears to be human stock, they were uniquely designed for spacefaring life. The servitors designed to maintain the mechanics and to mine for new resources were bred to be tough. Tough enough to be able to gather the precious resources needed from passing asteroids and comets, to withstand extremes of temperature and gravity. Those servitors that ran the many subsystems, running minor course corrections, overseeing slaved computer matricies and carrying out delicate wiring and circuitry maintenance were small and nimble, with a cunning able to dodge between mechanisms and keep them running. Their minds adapted to interface directly with the strange biomechanical computing that ran the ship. Their heads always abuzz with computations.

After the great impact, some of those aboard survived, wrapped in emergency impact couches. Preserved against the ravages of cold and time until the Earth settled in its Orrery and the dawn of life once more arose across its surface. Only then did they awake to stumble confused and groggy from the wreckage and into a new world. This is where the Dwarves and the Halflings first arose from; descendants of the servants of the dread Lich King.

The Maze Itself

The concept I had for this was the ability to both plonk down some random ancient science-fantasy bullshit wherever I felt like on my world (fragments of the Lich King's vessel) and to have a cool ever changing dungeon in the Black Pyramid itself. Perhaps one day I will have to actually build it, maybe start stapling random dungeons together and start playing with ever changing interiors and the like, but for now it is enough to know that such a place exists and it is a place that players can go if they wish to.

The End Boss

I haven't quite decided what to do with this, and in the off chance that any of my players read this I'm presenting a few different options (along the lines of the Wicked King).

1) The Lich: At the centre of the Tomb you find the powerful Lich King. Probs best to kill it before it kills you!

2) Terrible Darkness: The Lich has grown in power, it is now a terrible dark god and you have disturbed its amorphous slumber.

3) The anti-climax: Personally, my favourite. The Lich is dead at the centre of the great black pyramid. Pierced through with a spar of metal during the crash all those thousands of years ago. The Pyramid is still dangerous, but the terror of the Lich only still lives in stories, and the hearts and minds of all Halflings and Dwarves.

Other Planets

So, as you may know, I put the world on an Orrery. I did this, partly because I could, and partly to remind myself to keep things weird. I am a chronic systematiser, not so much from a scientific standpoint as a historic one, and I will tend to think a little too extensively about the social effects of anything I place in my world for funsies. So to this end, I wanted to remind myself that this was not a place that always works rationally. Plus, it is a really medieval mindset, and I sort of like running a world where the medieval theories are proved true (note to self: do something with leeches).

The other thing I really love about this very archaic view of the Universe, is the opportunity to populate other celestial bodies with alien civilizations, which are weirdly similar to the sort of thing you would find back home (blame Lucian and Terry Gilliam). It gives a chance for people to wander out amongst the stars and still adventure in a relatively recognisable place. A little bit of Classic Sci-Fi in there speculating about civilisations on Mars and Venus.

However it also serves the other purpose of getting me away from my systematising. There can be places that are essentially an entirely different setting. If I have been a bit too low magic, lets have a place where magic is the norm. Not enough high fantasy savage kingdoms? Another planet for that. Here are a few of the other objects spinning in the Orrery. (What do you mean there are more than seven planets? What are you high? Get outta here!)

City of the Moon Wizards

One of the oldest of the civilizations of the celestial bodies. Made up of students of magic who slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of god, and never got around to coming back. Think they are much more enlightened and civilized than earth dwellers. Magic use is much more common on the moon, and virtually all people there are spell-casters of one stripe or another. Mostly taken up with intestine politicking, bickering, and academic symposia. The city of the moon wizards is known to be a fanciful fairy-tale by most sensible people.

The towers of the Moon Wizards can be seen with particularly powerful optics, however sceptics claim that these sightings are likely the result of smudges on the lens.

[A good place to run high magic adventures, given that in the regular world magic is weird and not often used, or at least not for everyday purposes]

The Majesty of the Sun

Surprisingly cool for all that it is a giant lamp that lights and warms the world. The air is like curtains of fire that does not burn, a constant aurora of light. The inhabitants of the sun are strange creatures made of fire and light, as well as seemingly normal humans who seem without a care. Gold is worthless here due to its common nature (although Silver, the tears of the Moon, is treasure beyond price), it lies in great heaps as common stones lie on the earth.

There is a constant feeling that this place is the seat of some ineffable wisdom, of great and secret knowledge held by all the inhabitants. However, none of them seem to be able to properly articulate this, so maybe they are just very stoned.

The sun is a land of plenty, merely eating the fruit of that land bestows unending life and vitality. Indeed death, strife, and want seem unknown there. Where else might one lie upon a mountain of gold dust, caring nothing for it save how much it resembled warm sand? However, woe to those who take from the Sun's hoard, for theirs is a doom that will hunt you until the least of the coins is returned.

The Mutability of Mercury

A glistening and changeable land, protean in its geography and its inhabitants. All the creatures that reside on Mercury are mutable in form. Dopplegangers, Changelings, Skinchangers. It is said that the flowers that bloom iridescent on the silvered hillsides hold the secret to trans-formative powers and even eternal life.

Much of the surface is covered in a bright and shining sea, all land is made up of small archipelagos, each island having its own little self contained adventure à la Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

This is also the only place to acquire "True Mercury" of which the quicksilver of Earth is but a pale imitation.

Dawn Treader Concept Art; Justin Sweet

Princesses of Mars

As befits its name, it is a planet perpetually at war. The next largest celestial orb after the Sun and Moon, it glows red with the blood of those spilled in its endless internecine conflicts. The great canals of the land bespeak some lost civilization, and certainly there are ancient tombs and structures at least as old as the civilization of the Serpent Folk dotted around its surface.

This great and warlike orb is divided between its rival, and thematically distinct, principalities. Each led by a Princess that epitomizes the theme.

Great for High Fantasy wacky adventures. Maybe involving a boy and his best friend/brother/dog?

Don't look at me like that, you knew this was coming

Old Venus

Last of the Naga Exciles inhabit this densely forested spheroid. Once the masters of the Earth, the last vestiges of their once great civilization cling to this abandoned world. Settled by a last hope space flight, set to launch as the Earth was pulled away from its native home, and through the cold void between the worlds, somethign went wrong. Other ships much have launched easily enough, but this one ship was left frozen in time, only wrenching free of its cradle once the Orrery was at least part constructed.

Retro sci-fi feel, ancient astronauts, sufficiently advanced technology and all that. Crazy magical adventures, as the Naga practice a sorcery combined with technology. Great for mighty doomsday weapons, warforged robots, ancient computers spitting out nonsense readings. Not interested in returning to Earth, want to sail the stars to find their lost brethren. Only answers you might get about the Orrery are here.

Air Oceans of Jupiter

A planet of airs and vapours, where the air is of a density that one may float and fly throughout it as fish do in water.

Castles in the sky inhabited by giants, terrible beasts that lurk in the lower airs.

None know what lurks in the depths of the Air Ocean, although some that have searched the ,lowest have claimed that deep below the clouds they have seen some great dark land, and the tops of immeasurably tall trees.

Cloud Castle

Saturn: The Dead Planet

A place of cold emptiness. Also a place of secrets. The history of the world, the story behind the Orrery. All can be found here.

This planet is the furthest out, and closest to the stars. From here you can hear them sing and talk, in their usual way, rather in the half madness they fall into when they fall to earth. It may be that all these great halls of knowledge were made by beings who listened and noted down the talk of the stars, perhaps it was a planet for the stars themselves (the halls are certainly far too big for anyone of human proportions). Whoever made the great records, they are gone now.