While Ryan and Perram are on-air, Alexander Augunas and Anthony Li aim to misbehave! Each week on Private Sanctuary off-weeks, either the Everyman Gamer or the Man Behind the Screens comes to the Private Sanctuary with a bit of a brain exercise involving their shared project: the demiplane from Create Demiplane. This week, the Everyman Gamer is going to be dreaming up the basics for a wintery metropolis within the frozen Demiplane.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first installment of Private Sanctuary Press! I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and today I’m coming at you with an announcement of sorts.

As part of our network reshuffling, Anthony and I are going to only air the Private Sanctuary on off-weeks for Know Direction. Our data suggests that but short-term and long-term, more people listen to the Private Sanctuary Podcast when we’re not competing with Ryan and Perram on our release date, so we want to improve the number of people who are listening to our show. We aim to please YOU, folks!

Also as part of the rejiggering, Anthony’s blog is now bi-weekly on Thursdays. (He shares the same week as new blogger James Ballod.) As a result, we decided to create something NEW for you all on Private Sanctuary off-weeks, and that’s the Private Sanctuary Press! Initially, PSP is going to be synonymous with Create Demiplane, but maybe someday in the future we’ll open it up to cover additional topics in blog form. But for now, its all Demiplane, all the time.

So I thought long and hard about what I wanted to talk to you about today, and I decided that its going to be the city of Rimemoor.

Rimemoor

One thing that Anthony and I have been talking about a lot lately is exactly HOW our Demiplane became frozen, and while that’s not a topic I want to address today, it is something that I’ve been thinking about. If you’ve ever seen The Day After Tomorrow, its a super campy film, but having watched it recently, the scenario of mass-freezing it shows made me immediately think of the Demiplane. In fact, there’s this one really evocative scene where Dennis Quaid’s character is walking into New York City, which has been recently hit by a subzero blast of cold air. He’s looking down at the ground and all of these bodies are just frozen there, unmoving. While I didn’t find this scene emotionally powerful in the context of the movie, it was a REALLY artistic scene that I thought could serve our campaign setting well.

IDEA: When the Demiplane froze over, most people didn’t have any warning, and it wasn’t incremental or even throughout the region; certain, localized areas were blasted with cold so intense that people froze where they stood, sort of like an icy version of Pompeii. This didn’t happen in many cities, but one such place was the city of Monnorvre, a small portside city that was ruled by a lesser noble named Bjnaer Gladfre. He ran an honest city that was was a highly desired trading crossroads, both by land and by sea. After several attempts to assassinate him, Bjnaer quickly versed himself in politics and became as deft at handling himself in the courts as on the battlefield.

That, of course, didn’t help Bnjaer or his people when a Young Adult black dragon named Alxernar attacked with his army of kobolds, intent on taking the city for himself. Neither dragon nor man could have predicted what would happen that day as they fought in the heart of town, as frigid snow fell to the earth in the midst of summer. Enemies stopped in wonder as flake by flake fell from the heavens, quickly rendering the ground impassable. The skies open with a deluge of ice and snow, and the temperature dropped so quickly that man, kobold, and dragon alike instantly froze in place. In one brief movement, the Monnorvre and the armies that fought for it were no more.

Years later, a skilled but foolish necromancer named Lanjir stumbled upon the ruins of Monnovre and its endless field of frozen soldiers while fleeing the newly established Draconian Accord . Cackling over his fortune at finding a dragon corpse perfectly preserved in the snow, the necromancer performed a dangerous ritual in an attempt to raise Alxernar as his thrall. Unfortunately, the ritual backfired, and although the dragon was at a disadvantage, the necromancer’s corporeal shell quickly succumbed to the elements, shuttling his mind directly into Alxernar’s corpse, psychically animating it as a ravener.  His two minds merging together into a single, abominable whole, Alxernar gazed out upon the frozen wastes that were once a rolling sea and idyllic plains and loathed what he saw, bestowing the name Rimemoor upon the land. Enraged at the prospects of being trapped in a Young Adult body for the rest of his unlife, Alxernar immersed himself into the wizardly arts of Lanjir’s past and, combined with the sorcerery that was his draconic birthright, mastered the necromantic arts of the arcanist. Fueled by hatred for the living, especially the Draconic Accord that shamed the human aspects of his new personality, Alxernar rose the soldiers of Monnovre and its people into undead servants and citizens under his leige: humans, kobolds, and beasts alike.  But before all others, he crafted a suit of powerful armor and presented it to the corpse of his foe in life, Bjnaer Gladfre, and rose the only foe whom he had ever considered a worthy adversary as a grave knight under his command, the first and greatest of his Ravener Guard.

I’m not quite sure how Rimemoor will play into our demiplane, whether it’ll stay in this incarnation or change any, but I really like the idea of a Young Adult dragon who is a big deal in the world, even if that dragon is dead. In many ways, Alxernar isn’t on equal footing with other dragons in the demiplane, but in others he far surpasses them. Without the shackles of life, he has no need for mortal servants and takes them only out of spite. I like to think that the humans actually live and work in Rimemoor and try to cut a living for themselves in the harsh land, but beyond that I’m not sure. As we mentioned in Episode 285, the idea of humans as a “hoard” that dragons collect is interesting; maybe Alxernar feels the same way?

How do you think Rimemoor and Alxernar should fit into our Demiplane? Leave your answers and comments below, or take to the forums and participate in one of our many Create Demiplane conversations. But until next time, I’m the Everyman Gamer, and I’m signing off.