Bulwark
History
For nearly a thousand years, the Magocracy of Sarvinia was a land shrouded in mystery. Almost entirely closed to outsiders by powerful magic, any vessel that dared attempt to sail into the forbidden land would be destroyed by the powerful storms perpetually roiling for miles upon miles of unbroken sea off the shore. Beneath the waves, the magically enhanced aquatic life aggressively defended against outsides who would seek a path below the waves. For those with the power to soar above the clouds, the crown of the storm was defended by kingdoms of cloud giants, resolute in their treaty to defend Sarvinia from outside interference. Even those who would seek to use powerful magic to shift between dimensions or traverse between points by way of teleportation would find themselves diverted, waylaid or captured in the attempt to enter this forbidden land. Only a single port, Serenis, was open to the outside world, allowing merchants to witness a glimpse of the secret empire from the merchant district far below the cliffs of the city proper. From here, business could be conducted, bringing the raw materials, food and wealth the avaricious mages sought in return for the exotic goods produced by the workshops and laboratories of the city. From every corner of the world, nations would send their merchant fleets through the narrow pass in the storms in hopes of purchasing the power to sway the course of history.
After several hundred years, the Magocracy largely closed its ports, permitting merchants to approach the city only for a single week every decade. For that single week, the pass would open and permit passage. Then, exactly one week later, the merchants would be expelled and the pass would be closed. For the weeks prior to the opening of the passage, fleets of merchant ships would clash with each other - and with pirates and privateers - awaiting the opening of the channel so that they could be the first to conduct their business during this brief window, reaping the greatest of the rewards. This continued until the 80th year of this tradition whereupon, at the chosen time, the pass did not open, leaving the merchants to sail home in failure.
For another 20 years, the merchants waited, some sailing idly by every few weeks in hopes that Sarvinia would open their gates in secret. Most, however, awaited the next designated time, arriving hopefully at the appointed location, awaiting the opening that would never come, and sailing home in defeat. No contact with the kingdom was possible, although the Cloud Giants swore that the Sarvinia nobles had upheld the bargain that perpetuated their guardianship, making even this route of learning the truth impossible. After two decades, most nations and merchant fleets had decided that the hope that Sarvinia would one day reopen was not worth the expense of constant vigilance, and they gave up entirely. No more fleets awaited the gates. No more ships sailed past the edge of the maelstrom.
27 years after the gates had been closed, however, a lost pirate vessel, badly damaged from a recent skirmish, sailed to the edge of the Maelstrom, alarmed to see the passage open. Desperate for a port, the vessel sailed through the passage and arrived at the merchant district. Upon disembarking, however, they found the city now inhabited by hostile monsters, largely uninterested in negotiating. Although they suffered heavy casualties, the pirates were able to re-provision their ship and sail home, where they quietly sought adventurers willing to return to the apparently abandoned city with them to scour it for riches.
It is here, in the first Year of the Gate, that our story begins, with high hopes for an expedition planning to establish a base of operations within the lost kingdom, the better to plunder the forgotten wealth of this powerful and ancient empire.
Information
Bulwark is a Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition game set in the newly minted city of Bulwark, established upon the ruins of Sarvinia's merchant district. The mystery of what happened to the inhabitants of Serenis, as well as the nature of the forces that have taken up occupation of the once proud city of Sarvinia, are major themes of the game, but the philosophy behind the game is to have an interesting unified setting for multiple groups of adventurers. In a sense, the intention is to create a Westmarches style game where any character or party could find themselves hunting treasure either as a pickup game or as an ongoing campaign. The city of Bulwark, acting as a base of operations, will be the point from which the characters will typically sally forth, although other fronts and teleportation locations may become available as parties retake parts of the lost kingdom.
Megadungeons, vast expanses of wilderness, pocket dimensions and exotic worlds will all factor in as possible sources of adventure. Magic items, both as trinkets and as powerful consumable resources, will be common, with more powerful items becoming abundant with greater exploration. As the game continues, outside groups may find their interest in the city bolstered and additional rivals may show up.
Morality and Ethics
The game of Dungeons and Dragons is inherently built around a number of regressive reactionary concepts, most notably the idea that there are objective good and evil, and the notion that some creatures are inherently so. I generally reject this, apart from creatures that are literally semi-sentient manifestations of concepts (demons, daemons, devils, angels, rakshasa, devas and qlippoths, for example). One of the reasons that goblins, orcs, gnolls and other sentient "monstrous" races are used as adversaries is that we, as humans, tend to view non-human things as other in a way that we find easy to handle. We don't have to focus overmuch on the nature of our battles with these creatures, because they're there for the purpose of being slain. Killing a goblin, to most players, seems to carry less moral weight even than killing a wolf or bear.
It isn't my goal to perpetuate the notion that these creatures are somehow permissible to murder, given that they are different (something explicitly suggested in early editions of the game, incidentally). Furthermore, I have always disliked the trope that "primitive" = "bad." However, games need adversaries, and gnolls, kobolds, trolls, goblins, ogres and the like are recognizable as such. By and large, their cultures will be treated as evil in the D&D sense, and they will be adversarial, although not every encounter should end in death. At the very least, it will have the sort of moral ambiguity one finds in a feudal world, wherein it is by might and show of arms that plunder and land are claimed from those too weak or foolish to defend it.