The Player Characters are fantasy heroes in a small fishing town called Dark Harbour in a world that has been tapped of most of its opportunities for adventure: no great evil Lich Kings, most of the Great Elder Dragons are asleep. Adventuring has moved on. The player characters ply their trade in Dark Harbour as caravan guards, boaters, scouts, but aside from some light banditry and the one boat fire that threatened the entire harbor if not for some quick thinking, Dark Harbour’s got nothing to offer a world that doesn’t have anything to offer a team of crack adventurers.
Then Vallmarks opens up a tower in Dark Harbour, litterally overnight with the help of magic. Vallmarks is an association of wizards, sorcerors, artificers, enchanters and adventurers that provides their services at a very competitive price because they’re so large, and they can supply ANYTHING that the Player Characters can do at a cost much lower than the PCs can charge and live comfortably. They are here to drive the adventurers in Dark Harbour out of business so that they can perform their dread deeds.
Globalisation represents a very powerful force: entire communities becoming dependent on an unsustainable and economically damaging business. Vallmarks isn’t evil, and shouldn’t be presented as such, but people are stupid and lazy, and willing to sell their futures short for the sake of convenience. The Player Characters could just leave, sure, but it is their home: Dark Harbour should be presented in such a way as to highlight to the Player Characters that it may be full of stupid and naive people, but Vallmarks threatens their communities in a far more insidious way than any half-demonic ogre mage’s ever-burning army of vampiric centaurs.
Vallmarks’ ultimate agenda is to make itself indispensible to the community, and then engineer tensions between the two countries that Dark Harbor sits on the borders of. As the drumbeat of war begins, Vallmarks solidifies their control of the town by driving everyone out of business and forcing them to accept jobs working for Vallmarks, then uses this captivated labor force to mass produce weapons that will be used by either side, meanwhile opening supercentres in the castles of both sides.
It’s up to the Player Characters to avert a war for profit, and reveal the insidious plot of Vallmarks once and for all.
