Zakkarii Aarlen

This kicks off entry #2 in my challenge, how exciting! In my last post, I talked about a setting that I had begun building last year. I was originally going to spend today's session working on it, but I decided to change my plan and work on a detail for my Legends of Akeroth game instead. This is a solo campaign that I'm streaming on Twitch; you can catch the VODs on my Youtube channel. It's taking place in the Erwick region of Akeroth, which is the canon setting for the game. However, I am homebrewing some elements, such as the city that my character will establish a "home base" in, so to speak.

Windford is a small city on a river that is full of artisans, has Venetian-inspired architecture, and a fledgling adventurer guild. I used the Story Engine decks to help produce a few of these broad details and in session two, I determined that the city also has a few waterways throughout it. So it is definitely inspired by Venice, and I want to lean into that a little. While I'm not going to work on a city layout yet, I want to create a few more key points about the city today.

Also, the mask my LoA session pngtuber wears is also Venetian-inspired! Many thanks to Cheeki for suggesting it; at the time, she didn't even know that Windford had Venetian inspirations. Truly a funny coincidence!

I started by looking at artwork created by Venetian artists. Here are a couple of pieces I found that I liked and gave me a good aesthetic vibe.

I grabbed the art by Francesco Larrazo Guardi because they were paintings of Venice by someone who had been there in person. The Giambattista Tiepolo piece I chose because I really liked the lighting and composition of it, but this image also included the decorative frame around it. Tiepolo is also listed as having been an artist of the Rococo style, which was born out of a resistance to classicist art. When I was skimming the Wikipedia article on the movement and saw that, I had an idea.

When I first created Windford, I jotted down that it was full of artists and artisans because many fled there during a historical disaster. I also drew a couple of cards that resulted in the point of interest of "a street where a famous artist's studio was once located, that birthed a famous art style". Now I have a link to two different concepts: a disaster and the birth of an art movement, because one of the things about Rococo is that it has origins or themes about the common man, a rebellion against the elite society.

What if that disaster was caused by a group of elites or nobility? Soon after an exodus to Windford, a small group of artists who were part of the refugees get back to creating art. Influenced by their experiences and the consequences of the disaster that was surely felt by the region as a whole, a new art movement was born.

This doesn't mean that the art movement is specifically Rococo, but it does give me a stronger idea of what the disaster could have been. Before, I just had "historical disaster", something that happened a few decades ago at the least, well before my character's birth. Now I have "a historical disaster that was caused by elites/nobility, and a famous art movement took place because of it".

This may not seem like I got very far on the idea, but as of this post, my campaign does not have a villain. What if the villain is related in some way to that disaster? It happened some time ago, so if he* was alive at that time, then he is either undead or still alive by some other means, likely magical. OR he's a kin that is longer lived, as there are some kin in Akeroth that can live for two centuries.

* I say he, because the only detail I do know about this guy is that he's male, as pre-determined by my personal agenda.

While the history of this city is still fairly vague, today I linked two previously disconnected ideas and created a new way of how my villain could potentially be linked to an event. It's still up in the air if he is or isn't, but that's something I can mull on in my head at work.

I think next week, I'll get back to the setting from my first post...unless the LoA brainrot continues. And if you haven't already, check it out on BackerKit, where you can get a free playable demo for solo and group play if you follow!