Campaign Pitch: Acmori

"Ere he had fallen to the depths, and died a victim for mortalkind

A strange being, who has no body nor mind.

Dodkul, the master of the dead, gives life to the dead, and death to the aspirant.

A new god of the land. His name is Tyrant. 

He commands a group of powerful creatures, called The Judges of All Vice. 

They hold dominion over all the ice."

- from the Chelonian Fragment of I AM VERGAR

Faith, by Arnaud Pheu

Character Generation

You can make any number of PCs, that's fine.

PCs are baseline characters in your GLoGhack of choice, except they start with snow shoes, straps and leads, and a spiked ice-stock. You speak mundane languages like Acmor, Low Dialect, Nasjicu, Sanx, Semaphore, or some provincial tongue. You also know Trade Sign, a full-body sign language used to communicate with almost anyone one the sea. You may speak esoteric languages like the Dog language, Aurora, in Beard Knots, Binary, or Trepaniat, the language of the trepanned.

You will also work together with your DM to establish some facts about your home island: whether it sustains a city or is totally rural, what religious sect is primary, what your first mundane language should be, and the character and creatures of the island.

Expeditions

Your characters are leaders in the island's community, the sort of people who are trusted to go on the winter expeditions to find new routes to other islands, to brave strange events on the ice and strange wildlife, and to act as representatives of your island's interests. You will be spending these winters on expeditions, and the rest of the year will be spent in "down-time," where you buy and sell routes, supplies, and treasures as you pursue your own goals, start a family, and deal with events,

Route maps (and treasure maps) will show you some landmarks, and give you an idea of how many encounters you may expect on your way to your destination. When on expeditions, expect to randomly encounter nautical or arctic oddities. You will also frequently face trouble if you are not properly equipped for the ice, but you already start with what you need; snow shoes, straps and leads, and a spiked ice-stock. Upon reaching your destination, you will find a unique and dangerous ecosystem and will face trouble for as long as you are not properly equipped for it. You won't necessarily know what you need, but anyone who lives there might.

Berg Strider, by Filip Burburan

Mystic Floes

This premise bounds a location-based adventure structure with domain play from the get-go, and can easily accommodate many dungeons. This exists against a conflict-creating background. Before the ice came to Acmori, it was the domain of Socu worshipers, who practice a faith of hospitality and pastoral isolation, visiting their neighbors with boats or zoa, giant floating organisms. With the ice came the Dodkulists, the servants of a dead god and His righteous dead servants. These newcomers of the past centuries are here on pilgrimage, and seek to perform rites of rebirth at the graves of all, creating instant tension throughout the sea. Giants stead the sea floor, strange lights fill the sky, and seers presage utter destruction of all by fire. 

The campaign's structure allows very easily for modules in the form of route maps. As a DM, you can preroll a route and take additional time tying the elements together. You can also repurpose the route map generator as a Redwall-style prophecy, prerolling the encounters on the ice as well and tweaking those to match a broader theme. In the next few weeks, I am going to demonstrate these techniques and thereby create modular expeditions.