This is a grim land. Summers are short. Winters are long. The towns are overcrowded. Food is expensive. Guilds control trade. Nobility control the taxes. Priests pray for our damned souls.
Out there, beyond those walls, are beasts, bogies, monsters. They inhabit the forests, live under the fields, dwell in the ruins of our burned-out fortresses. They kidnap the lone wanderer, harry our caravans, and when they are bold, they attack our towns.
This land is wild, untamable, and in it we struggle to survive. We who thought we could conquer it, subjugate it—we are guests here, our days numbered.
Our forebears succeeded in wedging a toehold—a small point of light in a vast, weird darkness. Their hubris led them to believe they had won, that victory was inevitable. But they were wrong. The forests fought back. The mountains rebelled. The seas heaved in protest. Things issued forth from crevices and caves; the foam and fire spat forth a writhing, crawling answer to our fathers’ “conquest.” We fought them. We banished them. We flung spell and prayer at them. But they came like a creeping tide, forcing us steadily back.
So now most of us crowd into our walled towns and make do with what’s been given to us. Some hardy folk brave the long nights and, far behind our defenses, work the soil at dawn. A few of us—those with nothing left—take up torch and sword and stride forth into the dark wilds.
For underneath the roots are the ruins of those who came before us. Layers of foolhardy civilizations crumbling atop one another like corpses. Each thought they could conquer this land. Each failed.
But in failure, they left us hope. They left us gold, artifacts, secrets, knowledge. Those brave or foolish enough to bring back these treasures are richly rewarded. Those successful enough can even can rise above their station.
Thus, we can become heroes.
…if we survive.
Adventurer is a dirty word. You’re a scoundrel, a villain, a wastrel, a vagabond, a criminal, a sword-for-hire, a cutthroat.
Respectable people belong to guilds, the church or are born into nobility. Or barring all that, they’re salt of the earth and till the land for the rest of us.
Your problem is that you’re none of that. You’re a third child or worse. You can’t get into a guild—too many apprentices already. You’re sure as hell not nobility—even if you were, your older brothers and sisters have soaked up the inheritance. The temples will take you, but they have so many acolytes, they hand you kit and a holy sign and send you right out the door again: Get out there and preach the word and find something nice for the Immortals.
And if you ever entertained romantic notions of homesteading, think again. You’d end up little more than a slave to a wealthy noble.
So there’s naught for you but to make your own way. There’s a certain freedom to it, but it’s a hard life. Cash flows out of your hands as easily as the blood from your wounds.
But at least it’s your life.
And if you’re lucky, smart and stubborn, you might come out on top. There’s a lot of lost loot out there for the finding. And salvage law is mercifully generous. You find it, it’s yours to spend, sell or keep.
Generally the way Torchbearer breaks down is that playing is divided up into individual adventures that last about 3-7 sessions. The party goes forth to find a dungeon, spends those sessions dealing with that dungeon, and then returns to town victorious. A few months pass while the party does whatever it does in its downtime, and then they set out again to find a new dungeon. Because of that structure it's fairly easy to switch GMs between adventures (particularly if a PC dies). I'd expect people to stick around for at least the length of one adventure, but if people want to bow out after one is done then the structure of the game makes that very easy to accommodate.Torchbearer is a riff on the early model of fantasy roleplaying games. In it, you take on the role of a fortune-seeking adventurer. To earn that fortune, you must explore forlorn ruins, brave terrible monsters and retrieve forgotten treasures.
However, this game is not about being a hero. It is not about fighting for what you believe. This game is about exploration and survival.
You may become a hero. You might have to fight for your ideals. But to do either of those things, you must prove yourself in the wilds.
Because there are no jobs, no inheritance, no other opportunities for deadbeat adventurers like you. This life is your only hope to survive this world.
General expectation is playing on Sunday evenings US time. I mostly make this post as a reference point that I can point people back to, but if other people are curious I'm certainly willing to answer any questions here.